Halo: The Clone Wars
by Cmdr. Gen. Marasco
Summary: When a Separatist ship makes a blind jump into the Unknown Regions, the Republic follows. What they don't know is that following this ship will put them in contact with the UNSC...and change the entire course of the Clone Wars. WILL BE UPDATED SOON WITH MORE INFO FROM HALO 4 AND THE NEWLY RELEASED BOOKS
1. Blind Jump

**Halo: The Clone Wars**

**Prologue:**

**Blind Jump**

For the third time in the last hour, the blackness of space over the planet Bakura filled with the brilliant fire of a capital starship exploding. In utter silence, the Confederacy of Independent Systems Munificent-class frigate, under the combined fire of several Republic Venator-class Star Destroyers, transformed from ugly, angular threat into billowing fireball and spewed flaming chunks of itself for hundreds of meters in every direction. The fires cooled quickly, extinguished by the harsh vacuum surrounding it. The force of the blast continued, sending the spewed debris into an impromptu asteroid belt around the planet. Said field had only moments to begin settling into an irregular orbit before it was once again stirred, this time by the Star Destroyers that moved through it in pursuit of the final, fleeing CIS ship.

Behind the angular transperisteel windows of the bridge of the Star Destroyer _Resolute_, the flagship of the three-vessel force pursing the droid ship, Admiral of the Grand Army of the Republic Wulff Yularen yawned. He scratched the stubble that had begun to accumulate on his chin, lost in thought. Though he would never admit it to the _Resolute_'s crew, Yularen was bored. Not that the clones under his command would care, but still. He'd been hoping for more of a challenge when General Skywalker (and by extension, him) had been assigned to protect Bakura from the surprise Separatist assault, but instead he'd gotten a textbook battle. Boring in the extreme. But, then again, he couldn't really expect any fancy moves from droids. They followed programming, nothing else. No thinking outside the box. Which was probably why they were usually lead by living, sentient creatures. No such luck on this run, though. All four ships in the enemy attack fleet were droid-controlled, and Yularen had easily dispatched them. Four frigates could overpower and destroy a single Venator, but Yularen had three. The only real surprise had come when one of the ships unexpectedly released quite a few more than the predicted number of Vulture Droids, but this had proven to be a minor, no, _less _than minor inconvenience. Even as Yularen stood there, he could see the small flashes of blue and red laser fire being traded between the droid fighters and the Republic's V-19 Vigilance fighters. Off to the "right" (that is, framed in the viewport to the right of where Yularen stood, as opposed to the central three the main body of fighters was viewable from), the twin specks of light that were the starfighters of General Skywalker and his Padawan Ahsoka danced around a larger group of droid fighters. And were winning. As Yularen watched, a large section of the enemy formation blossomed into clouds of parts under the precise fire of the two Jedi. Yularen yawned again, and moved towards the viewports. Might as well finish this off quickly. There were probably other systems in need of saving. Ones much more important than Bakura. Though the natives would never admit it, the only valuable thing that came out of the system was repulserlifts. And even those were usually of industrial grade, rather than military. It was, quite effectively, a useless system. Like Hoth, but with people on it.

It was, however, a Republic world, and had stayed that way since the beginning of the war. Yularen had come to suspect that this was merely a political stunt, a propaganda device to show that the Republic supposedly cared for all its worlds. Even the supposedly useless ones. That was the only explanation Yularen could come up with for sending two of the most powerful Jedi in the Order and three badly-needed Star Destroyers to defend Bakura.

_Well,_ He thought. _A political victory is still a military victory, no matter what they say. _

He turned away from the viewports, and was about to head back towards his quarters (he obviously wasn't needed, and if he was he could be on the bridge in less than a standard minute) when one of the clones rushed up to him.

"Sir," he said, saluting in the disturbingly habitable way clones did. "We have an incoming transmission from Commander Tano."

Yularen raised an eyebrow. For a moment, he played with the idea that something interesting was happening. Then he dismissed it just as quickly. Most likely, the Togruta Jedi was calling to tell him something he already knew. Still, she was a Jedi, and the regulations said that any non-Jedi listened to the Force-users, no matter what rank they were. Yularen strode towards the large tactical holotable in the back of the bridge. The clone there saluted, then punched several buttons to bring up the holographic view of Ahsoka. She was in her fighter, and as Yularen watched he could see streaks of laser fire flashing by her canopy.

"Go ahead, Commander." He said, placing his arms behind his back and clasping his hands. "Do you have something to report?"

"It's the enemy ship, sir." Ahsoka responded. The holographic representation of her flickered slightly as the actual Jedi slammed her fighter into a roll to dodge a missile. "I'm not totally sure, but I think it's maneuvering for a hyperspace jump." The holo flickered again as the missile Ahsoka had avoided self-destructed, washing her fighter with electromagnetic energy.

Yularen turned away from the holotable towards the large glass tactical map in front of it. A quick check showed that Ahsoka's guess had been correct. But something nagged at Yularen. He could understand the droid's want to escape, but surely even they could see that it was effectively hopeless? He didn't like it.

Yularen turned again, this time towards the clone at the communication station.

"Contact the _Emancipator _and the _Gualara_," He said, referencing the other two Destroyers under his command. "Tell them to break off pursuit and set up blocking positions on the hyperlanes out of here. I don't want that ship escaping."

"Yes sir!" The clone said. He typed quickly on his panel, sending the orders to the other Destroyers. Out the side viewports, Yularen watched as the ships moved out of formation towards their assigned positions. If the droids noticed the maneuver, they didn't react. In fact, they continued on their path. Yularen looked up at the screen. A quick calculation told him that there was only one way to go:

Into the Unknown Regions. The large, unexplored section of the galaxy. Yularen shook his head. There was nowhere to run.

He turned back towards Ahsoka's hologram.

"The ways are blocked, Commander." He reported. "That ship isn't going anywhere."

"You sure about that, Admiral?" The Togruta said, raising an eyebrow. "Cause it looks to me like they're powering up their hyperdrive."

That gave Yularen a shock. Surely the droid's wouldn't think of such a desperate maneuver? The only way to go through the Unknown Regions was a blind hyperspace jump. And Yularen doubted _that_ was a tactic programmed into droids.

But a quick check proved Ahsoka right once again. As he watched in utter amazement, the droid ship's engine's flared, and it seemed to elongate as it jumped into the other-dimensional faster than light tunnel of hyperspace. Straight into the emptiness beyond Bakura.

The bridge fell quiet for a moment, all chatter and orders paused in mid-breath. Yularen stared at the black space where the droid ship had been. Then, he turned and walked back towards the holotable.

"Find me that ship's direction." He said crisply to the clone standing there. The clone nodded, and quickly accessed the scanner memory. Data flashed up on screen. Yularen looked it over, then pressed a button on the panel, opening a communications link to General Skywalker.

"General, the enemy ship has made a blind jump into the Unknown Regions. Please advise a course of action." He waited for Skywalker to respond.

"Move the cruisers around to the point of its jump." Skywalker responded. "And prep the _Twilight_. We're going after that ship."

"Yes, sir." Yularen said, and cut the connection. He sighed, and scratched his stubble again.

It was beginning to seem he was going to get his wish. However it finally played out, this battle was _not_ going to end textbook.

* * *

Innumerable light years away from Bakura, past thousands of star systems, a couple black holes and several artificial constructs of multiple different species, a small, single occupant space station floated in the gravity well of a gas giant. The planet's glow bathed the small, roughly cylindrical station in dark orange light. The glow illuminated the flat black armor plates of the construct as it spun, revealing an insignia painted on its side. A bird, and eagle, to be exact, with wings outstretched and talons planted firmly on a planet. Below it stood four pictograms.

U…N…S…C.

This tiny station was the newly constructed first generation United Nations Space Command Defense Force Early Warning System and Counteroffensive Rally Point Station. Like the monitoring stations that came before it, it reached into both normal and Slipspace using sensors (most of which stood out of the bottom of the craft like the quills of some strange animal) and automated probes, searching for any threat or anomaly. The probes, however, were undergoing yet another hard and software update, which partially accounted for the station's relative quietness. The other reason was that there wasn't anything to detect. In the ten years since the end of the Human-Covenant War (one and a half of which the station had been active for), nothing had dare challenge the alliance of the UNSC and the Covenant Separatists. Not even the shattered remains of the Brutes had made any attempt at retaliation, and any ones that showed a possibility of rising up were quickly crushed. But, regulations were regulations, and they said the station needed to be manned at all times. Which was the only reason there was a living person on board at all.

The gas giants light filtered into the station though several windows, bathing the interior in the same orange light as the exterior. The light made the controls and readouts glitter like crystals, and reflected eerily off the luminescent-green paint of the armor being worn by the stations occupant, splashing different colors across the soldier's sleeping face. Beside the chair lay the armor's helmet, full face visor resembling the MJOLNIR EVA permutation and reflecting more of the giants light into the room. The resemblance was half right.

The soldier was a girl. She looked to be about 14 or 15, and the light from the helmet and gas giant made her buzz-cut honey-blond hair glow. Had her eyes been open, the light would have made them steel gray.

Her name was Samantha (known to her friends and teammates as Sam), and she was a Spartan-IV. Spartan-198, to be exact.

Sam shifted in her sleep, muttering something that might have been either "Chase" or "Pace", and turned over onto her side. Or tried to. The chair she slept in had been build for a normal human in uniform, and, thought Spartan-IV's were smaller than their predecessors by quite a bit, when in full MJOLNIR MK VI/B armor they still topped six feet easily. And Sam was one of the taller IV's. With a grunt, she fell out of the chair with a clatter of armor plates on metal floor, sprawling for only a second before her augmented muscles and reflexes sent her into a roll towards the other side of the station. She rose to a fighting crouch. Her eyes swept the area, but showed only the solid Titanium-A walls of the station and the still vibrating chair from which she had fallen. She stood, cursing and dusting herself off.

"Damn chair." She muttered. She grasped the chair with a gauntleted hand, and it stopped swinging on its spring-filled base. With a sigh, Sam sat down, wished for the umpteenth time she hadn't been given this duty for insubordination, and was about to go back to sleep, when one of the panels in front of her light up. She looked at it curiously.

_That's the Slipspace Mass Sensor,_ She thought. She tapped it, and brought up the reading.

Unfortunately, the SMS wasn't the most accurate piece of equipment on the station, and all Sam got was a read out on size, relative mass, and other data regarding whatever was traveling through Slipspace towards the station, and not anything truly useful, like what it looked like or it's composition. Sam sat back with a sigh of disappointment.

_Probably another Slipspace meteor,_ She concluded, thinking of the strange space rocks that somehow managed to break into Slipspace from the "normal" dimension the known universe resided in. They were relatively rare closer to Earth and the Inner Colonies, but out here, at the very edge of both UNSC and Elite space, they were a surprisingly common sight. During her three weeks on the station, Sam had seen 12 so far. She leaned back in the chair, wishing for something interesting to happen.

Second's later, her wish was granted. The console before her lit up, multiple sensors flashing warnings and alarms. Sam sprang to action, scanning the readouts. From what she could see, whatever was coming towards her was not a meteor. The contact was now close enough for most of the other sensors to activate, and the information scrolling across her screens showed it was artificial. It was made of an unknown metal, and rad counters were picking up what looked like an advanced fusion reactor. So it probably had a propulsion system.

It was a ship. An unknown ship. Sam's veins filled with liquid nitrogen. This was not good. She reached for the red button on her console, the Covenant-boosted hotline that led straight to Earth. Suddenly, ahead of her, but still outside of the gas giant's gravity well, space seemed to elongate. Not like a Slipspace transition, which looked like a giant bubble opening in the middle of the void of space, but a streak of color, as if whatever was traveling had become stretched. The form resolved itself, snapping into focus like a stretched rubber band contracting, becoming one of the ugliest ship's Sam had ever seen. And she'd been on board a couple Brute cruisers, so that was saying something.

It was angular and black, with a sloping bow and large rectangular fins jutting out from either side and the back. Behind the plates sat a boxy body, with multiple entrances that might have been hangers on either side. At the opposite end sat several large tubes that were probably engines. In the center of the bow, above the sloping plates, stood a roughly hexagonal glass-looking box that she assumed was a bridge.

It was dark, as was the rest of the ship. Sam reached for her helmet, instinctively getting ready to fight. But the ship made no move other than to begin drifting away from the station, slowly spinning in a circle to starboard. As Sam watched, it rotated to that the starboard side was viewable to her.

Sam's mouth fell open at the sight of it. A large gaping hole spewed atmosphere into space, forming a large white cloud and propelling the ship in its spin. The hole was unnaturally clean. It wasn't made by a collision that was for sure. Sam silently slipped her helmet on and slapped the red button. The communications panel flared to light, and she found herself looking at the pale, lined face of Lord Terrance Hood, hero of the First and Second Battles of Earth and one of the UNSC's high commanders.

"This had better be good, Spartan." He said. But his tone was kind, or about as kind as a high ranking military officer could be. He trusted the Spartans. He knew they wouldn't call without a good reason.

"It's good, sir." Sam said, saluting as she did so. "Or, I guess bad would be more applicable. I've got a ship sitting just outside my window, and it ain't Covie or one of ours."

"Is it hostile?" Hood asked.

"Don't know, sir. I think its dead. Looks like it got into a fight with something. Suggest you send an investigation team to check it out."

"Hmm." Hood scratched his chin. "Alright, I'll send Alpha and Beta Teams with the _Kelly _and _Arthur _to investigate. In the mean time, sit tight, don't draw any attention. Am I understood?"

"Sir, yes sir." Sam said. Hood nodded to her.

"Good. Hood out." The screen went blank, and Sam sat back in her chair. Her heart pounded. Finally, some action.

She just hoped that whatever had damaged the ship didn't come looking for it.


	2. First Contact

**Chapter 1**

**First Contact**

Less than a day later, Sam was no longer the only living thing within a couple thousand light years of the station. Nor was the mysterious ship the only means of space travel residing in this area. Now, on the other side of Sam's station hung two UNSC ships. They resembled Halcyon-class cruisers, like the famed _Pillar of Autumn_, but they were much larger, almost the size of a Covenant Assault Carrier. The visual resemblance ended with their aft sections, which carried four full-sized engines to the Halcyon's two full-size and six smaller. They were arranged in a rectangle, on outrigger like structures similar to the ones sported by frigates of the now-renamed _In Amber Clad_ class, named for the famous ship that had been part of it. It had been described my one UNSC engineers as "if someone had cut the back end off a frigate, scooted it up a couple meters, and slapped an identical engine block upside down below it."

These were the newest UNSC ships of the line, built with the help of the Elites and launched less than a year ago, and bearing the names of the heroes that had helped preserve their creators long enough to bring them into reality. The dreaded, feared, and sometimes worshiped _Spartan_-class Supercrusiers.

Sam looked at them in awe as she stood in the station's small docking bay. _Small_ being the appropriate word for it, as it was barely large enough to hold a single Pelican. One of which was now rapidly approaching the station. Sam could see it if she looked closely, a small pin-point of light approaching from the ship on the right, the _Kelly_. The other ship, the _Arthur_, hung in space to the left, the space around it buzzing with Advanced Longsword and the new Cutlass-class fighter-bombers, ready to attack anything that could even possibly threaten the upcoming mission. Sam felt a lot safer now that the two ships were here. Combined, they carried 24 squadrons of fighter-bombers, six Heavy Triple MAC guns (each of which could shoot a series of slugs the size of her station in less than a minute), pulse lasers, who the hell knew how many Archer and Crossbow missiles, and a couple hundred 110 millimeter autocannons for point-defense. The only thing more powerful than them were the new _Retaliation_-class ships, and those wouldn't be in service for quite a bit. It seemed like an arsenal that could demolish any foe. Or so Sam hoped.

The loud blaring of the docking alarm woke the Spartan from her thoughts. The Pelican was visible now, a dark shape against the brightness of the gas giant. The craft's maneuvering jets flared as the pilot adjusted it's trajectory to meet with the station's bay. Another couple seconds saw it through the Elite-provided energy field that allowed solid objects (like ships) into the bay but kept oxygen in and micrometeorites out. It turned, settling back-end first onto the bay's single landing spot with a hiss of hydraulics and a short squeal of tires on metal. No sooner had the dropship settled than its troop bay door (infamously known as the "blood tray") opened with another hiss of hydraulics, quickly spilling eleven soldiers into the hanger. All wore MJOLNIR MK VI/B armor just as Sam did, though two of them had Recon helmet permutations instead of the MK VI/B's standard. One of these their hand to their faceplate and swiped two fingers across it in a downward arch; the famous "Spartan Smile." Sam returned her fellow Spartan's greeting.

Two Spartan's approached Sam. In the dim light of the hanger's lighting strips, Sam could see both bore the insignias of Master Chief Petty Officer on their right shoulders, just below the eagle-and-lightning symbol of the Spartans. Sam snapped a salute.

"What do you have for us, Sam?" Asked the one on the right. Sam's IFF system registered him as SPARTAN-122.

"Glad to see you to, Christian." She said, smiling under her helmet. Christian grumbled. He was still sore about Sam getting assigned to Beta Team instead of his Alpha, and took every chance to express it.

"Cut it out you two." Snapped the other Spartan. Sam turned and saluted.

"Yes ma'am." She said. Christian snorted.

"Yes ma'am," He said in a bad falsetto, then addressed the Spartan next to him. "Damn Kate, what the hell are you teaching your team?"

"Go slurp plasma." Kate spat back. Christian laughed.

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" He said.

"You don't know how much." Kate retorted, turning to Christian. Christian faced her as well. Sam, sensing trouble, stood in between the two of them. The fights between Spartans-122 and -206 were legendary, and she'd rather not have to call to the two UNSC vessels with injured even before they got on board the unknown ship outside, especially if the wounded was either her commanding officer or Alpha's.

"Uh, unknown ship? Recon mission?" She prompted. The two commanding Spartans backed away from each other.

"Alright, what happened?" Kate asked. Sam quickly filled her in on the events leading up to and the actual appearance of the ship. When she finished, both Kate and Christian fell silent as they processed the information.

"Well, I'm gonna guess this ship isn't something new by the Covies." Christian said at last.

"Can't argue with that." Kate said, thought she sounded like she would have liked to.

"So what now?" Sam asked.

"We find out what the hell it is." Christian said. Sam could tell he was grinning under his helmet.

"Let me guess," Kate said. "You want to board it."

"Only way to really get some intel." Christian said with a shrug. He turned back towards the remaining Spartans.

"Who's ready for some boarding action!" He shouted, fist raised. About half of the group (Alpha Team, Sam thought) raised their fist in salute and bellowed "Ohh Rah!"

The rest of the group (Sam's fellow Beta Teamers) stayed quiet.

"And how exactly do you expect us to get on board?" Kate asked sweetly, arms crossed. Christian paused, but only for a second.

"Sam said that thing's got a good sized hole blown in it, right?" He asked.

Sam nodded.

"Looks like it blew thought a couple decks, and it's gotta be at least twenty meters deep." She replied.

"So we just fly a boarding craft in thought the hole, land where we can, and fan out from there. And if we can't get in though that hole, we'll make one of our own." Christian shrugged again. "Simple."

"Hmmm." Kate said, arms still crossed. "And I assume you'll want to lead the action?"

"Of course!" Christian cried. "You know our motto." He turned to his team again. As one, they bellowed "First In, Last Out!"

"Well, have fun." Kate said. "Beta'll watch your back."

"Works for me." Christian nodded to Kate and Sam, then climbed back into the Pelican's bay, followed by his team.

"We'll try and leave something for you to play with." He said, as the blood tray closed behind him. Over the roar of the Pelican's jets, Sam heard Kate growl.

"Hard to believe we were ever related, isn't it?" She said, turning to Sam.

"Yes ma'am." Sam answered quickly.

"Come on. We have work to do." Kate turned and walked out of the hanger, Sam and Beta Team at her heels.

They had a mission to prep for.

* * *

Back in Bakuran space, the final remains of the Separatist assault fleet had just been cleaned up. Once again, the only obstructions to the natural flow of the system were the three Star Destroyers of Anakin Skywalker's command. The famous Jedi himself currently stood in the enormous hanger of the _Resolute_, preparing his beloved, if somewhat battered and modified G9 Rigger spice freighter _Twilight_ for the upcoming hyperspace jump. Currently, he was elbow-deep in wires, installing a new extreme long-range communication system. With a couple burst from his fusioncutter, he attached the final wire strands to the input ports. The communications panel on the control panel next to him lit up with a new light. Anakin sighed and slid the removed access panel back into place. As he did so, a stirring in the Force alerted him that he was not alone.

"Have I told you this plan is crazy?" Asked a female voice. Anakin turned around to see his Padawan Ahsoka standing behind the copilot's chair, arms crossed. She was quite obviously not happy about Anakin's decision to go after the droid ship with only the _Twilight_. Anakin made ready to explain himself, but was distracted by the arrival of his astromech R2-D2, the required-sized hydrospanner for replacing the access panel held in one of his manipulator arms. Anakin nodded his thanks to the little droid, who tootled in response and rolled away again. Anakin quickly reinstalled the panel.

"You've made yourself very clear, Snips." He said, observing the young Togruta's reflection in the _Twilight_'s viewscreen. "Still, it's probably the smartest thing to do."

"Oh, going up against a droid warship in a lightly-armed spice freighter is smart?" Ahsoka asked, rolling her eyes at her Master. Anakin couldn't help but smile.

"Well, it's smarter than sending three badly-needed capital ships into an unknown, unexplored section of space." He replied. "Besides, we know the ship was damaged. And it probably got pretty messed up during that blind jump. Shouldn't be too much of a problem for me to handle. If it's still active, that is."

"Well at least let me come with you!" Ahsoka said, leaning forward for emphasis. Anakin sighed.

"I told you before, Ahsoka," He said, clenching his mechanical hand around the hydrospanner. "I need you to be here to lead the battle group after me if I need help."

"But you won't need help!" His Padawan insisted. "You just said yourself-"

"Just stay here, Snips." Anakin said. "And get ready to move if I call for you."

"Yes, Master." Ahsoka replied, turning to leave the freighter's cockpit. Anakin noticed she somehow managed to make the word Master sound like some horrible slur. With a groan, he sank into the pilot's chair. He sometimes wondered why he even had a Padawan.

His dark thoughts were broken by the sudden reappearance of R2, who rattled of a series of beeps and whistles.

"Of course I know what I'm doing!" Anakin spat at the droid. "It's just like Ahsoka said during the briefing; I jump on the same course as the clankers did, but use the Force to smooth the way so I don't get caught in anything. Just like Gav and Jori Daragon."

R2 tootled some more.

"Well if they ran into anything, there won't be anything left, will there?" Anakin responded. "And we won't have to worry."

R2 whistled what sounded like a negative, and rolled out of the cockpit. Anakin sighed, before getting back to readying his ship.

Why was it that _everyone_ thought his idea was crazy?

Fifteen minutes later, the _Resolute_ changed position, angling itself for Anakin's lightspeed jump. The huge red-painted doors situated along the bow opened, allowing just enough space for the _Twilight_ to slip through. The dull-gray spice freighter extended its Tal Nami Freighter Swing Wing as it rose, then ignited all three of its engines and headed for the section of space which the droid ship had disappeared into. On board, Anakin adjusted several switches and yanked a lever. The _Twilight_ oriented itself. As Anakin did so, the holoprojector flared to life with a warble, showing the ghostly figure of Admiral Yularen.

"General Skywalker, you are cleared for hyperspace jump. Good luck, sir."

"Thank you, Admiral." Anakin replied, reaching up to switch of his navicomputer. He wouldn't be needing it for this. "I'll contact you if there's anything left. Skywalker out."

Yularen nodded, and the holoprojector shut down again.

With a sudden sense of anticipation, Anakin yanked back the lever that activated the hyperdrive and kicked the _Twilight_ into glowing blue tunnel of faster-than-light travel. Seconds later, the space around Bakura was once again still.

* * *

Christian looked out the boarding craft's viewport in awe. He'd never truly appreciated just how _strange_ the ship they were boarding was until now. It didn't have the nice, clean-cut lines of a UNSC ship, nor the almost-organic look of Covenant vessels, but could have passed as a basterdized hybrid of the two, painted a dreary grayish color that made it look like the ship was rusting as they watched. It seemed…wrong. At least to Christian.

But that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The bizarreness would keep his team on their toes, alert and ready for whatever the vessel would throw at them. The Drill Instructor's had told tales of what happened to soldiers who weren't prepared. That wasn't going to happen to Alpha Team. No way. They were the best. And now they finally had a chance to really prove it. No more simple search-and-destroy or anti-pirate missions for them.

Christian's thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the boarding craft executing a sharp starboard turn, which threw him and half of Alpha Team that were strapped into the seats on the port side of the craft against their harnesses and the other half into their seats. Christian grunted as the maneuver finished. He turned towards the front of the craft, where the pilot sat.

"Fucking hell, Matt, take it easy!" He spat. "We ain't under fire, are we?"

"Sorry, sir." Matt's voice replied, cool as ever. Christian couldn't see anything because of the pilots' seat Matt sat in, but he could guess that Spartan-303 wasn't even breaking a sweat over the clumsy craft under his control. "This thing wasn't originally designed for this job."

Which was basically true. The "boarding craft" the Spartans were riding was in all actuality an extremely modified Bumblebee-class lifeboat. The UNSC hadn't had any real boarding craft for a while, but in the mad and chaotic rush following the death of the Prophet of Truth, they'd found themselves in dire need of one. As a stop-gap, HIGHCOM had ordered the conversion of several hundred of the readily available lifeboats (most of which had been created for ships that never managed to leave the shipyards, thanks to the Covenant) into boarding craft. The conversion was quick and dirty, really nothing more than attaching a docking collar to the base of the lifeboat and adding boarding equipment to its hull, and hadn't included such things as precision thrusters. Which was why Christian was now once again being thrown against his harness. Grumbling to himself, the leader of Alpha Team clicked his radio on.

"Comm check." He said over it, voice lowered by the G-force of another harsh turn. "Sound off."

"Two-Seven, I'm green." Grunted a female voice. Christian's eyes flicked over to the bow of the craft on the opposite side. Spartan-027, Hester, gave him a thumbs up. Christian returned it.

"Kelly here. Ready to kick some ass." Spartan-113, the squad's sniper and unofficial funny girl, chimed in from a couple seats ahead of Christian.

"Crowbar's good to go. Gimmie something to smash, boss." Coraline-011, so-called "Crowbar" for the archaic demolition tool she carried as a weapon, added her voice to the group from the seat directly across from Christian. She nodded to him, and Christian returned it.

The final member of Alpha Team didn't say anything. Christian was about to order a COM check when he realized she wouldn't be saying anything. Ever.

"Can you hear me, Echo?" He asked. In the lower right corner of his HUD, a green status light blinked. Probably the closest Echo would ever get to truly addressing her commanding officer.

Spartan-419 was one of the more…unusual candidates for the SPARTAN-IV program. Mute since birth, she had almost washed out of the program for her myriad problems.

Until she, single-handedly, unarmed, and un-augmented, beat four Drill Instructors into unconsciousness.

She'd been only 11 at the time.

Which was why she was now sitting next to Christian, ready to board the mysterious ship.

"Stand by!" Matt called out. "We're through the hole. ETA 35 seconds."

"Roger that." Christian replied. He reached down between his legs and hefted his BR55HBU Battle Rifle. In one smooth motion, he clicked off the safety, cycled the chamber and checked the magazine. The rifle clicked, the bolt cycled smoothly, and the electronic ammo counter on its optical rail read 72 rounds. Christian grunted. All was in order. Just to be sure, he ejected the mag and examined its load. 10x40mm M634 Ultra-High-Powered Semi-Armor-Piercing rounds, just as he'd ordered. He slammed the magazine home again and checked over his team. They too were preparing for the mission, checking over the advanced (in some cases experimental) weapons they had received from the _Kelly_'s armory hours before.

Hester twirled her combat knife for a second before sliding it back into its sheath, then checked her dual M6D pistols. Kelly examined her SRS99E-S2 AMSO Sniper Rifle, giving Christian a good look at the large number of hash marks she'd cut into the barrel and body as she slid a magazine of eight 20x120mm HEAPHSFSDS rounds into its receiver. She adjusted something on the sight and grunted in approval. Coraline slapped her crowbar onto her right thigh's magnetic plate and yanked the charging lever on her MA5D rifle. She reached under her seat and slid an M10 HE-AP fragmentation grenade into the rifle's underslung M301 40mm grenade launcher. Echo, still silent, slid a series of 6-gauge Plasma-Boosted shells into her M90B shotgun and yanked the slide. She placed the pellet gun on her lap just long enough to check that the Energy Sword she had taken as a trophy from a defeated Brute (who in turn had taken it from an Elite) was attached to her leg. Several clicks emanated from the front of the landing craft, and Christian guessed Matt was checking his cherished M7S Silenced Submachine Gun. As if to prove his theory right, Matt attached the SMG to his thigh plate with a click.

Alpha Team was ready for action.

And not a moment to soon. Seconds after Matt finished with his SMG, the hull of the boarding craft reverberated with the sound of the docking ring attaching to part of the ship's damaged interior. Alpha Team simultaneously released their restraints and moved towards the back of the craft. They waited as the collar attached to the unknown ship, sealing with a loud hiss of pressurizing pneumatic plates. The noise reminded Christian of something he'd forgotten.

"Seal you suits." He barked. "We might be going into hard vacuum."

A chorus of affirmatives came back to him, and Alpha Team quickly sealed the few small openings in their suits and switched over to their three hour internal oxygen supply.

"Steady…" Christian muttered, as the docking collar finished it work and the sensor equipment started. "Steady…"

Alpha Team gripped their weapons, all eyes glued to the small light on the indicator panel over the back door. Suddenly, it winked green. The area on the other side was okay to enter. In one smooth motion, Christian punched the hatch release, bellowed "Now!", and, Alpha Team at his heels, jumped into the dark tube leading to the ship.

* * *

Anakin was awakened from his Force-assisted meditation by the chiming of his hyperdrive alarm. The _Twilight_ was approaching the approximated point of entry for the fleeing enemy ship. Apparently his use of the Force to clear the way for himself had been successful. He uncrossed his legs from the pilot's seat and leaned forward. The small screen on his control console counted down towards the reversion to realspace. The moment it his zero, Anakin shoved the hyperdrive lever forward and slipped from the tunnel of bluish light to the black of real space.

What he saw gave him a shock.

Floating in front of him was the enemy ship. It looked heavily damaged, and its lights and engines were dark. It turned slightly, giving Anakin a good view of what else was in system with him.

Hung in space against the brilliant backdrop of a gas giant, two ships and what looked like a space station floated serenely. The station looked tiny, barely the size of the now-dark enemy ship's bridge, and didn't seemed to be armed. It reminded Anakin strongly of Skytop Station, the Separatist listening post he and Ahsoka had destroyed in Ruusan's atmosphere, except on a much smaller scale. It didn't really worry him.

What did worry him were the two ships behind the station. They were enormous, easily two or three times the size of a Venator-class Star Destroyer. They didn't look like anything he'd ever seen before. They looked…archaic. As if someone had taken an armored land vehicle and turned it into a spacecraft. Not only were they bizarre, but from what he could see, they were bristling with weaponry. Fighter-like craft swarmed over the one on the right, and the other one had large hexagonal sections of its body plate open. Anakin could see small towers rising from them. Most likely turrets of some form. Like turbolasers. Anakin didn't like it at all.

Quickly, the Jedi Knight flicked his eyes back to his control console. He was in the right position to execute a return jump. He could leave if he needed to.

But they hadn't noticed him yet… He decided to stay for a little longer. He still had a mission to carry out.

He turned his eyes back to the remains of the Separatist ship slowly turning before him. As he watched, it continued to turn, presenting the side he hadn't seen earlier to him. Anakin noticed a massive hole blown through what he guessed had been a hanger at some point. His suspicions were confirmed as the frigate continued to roll, showing more hangers along it's side. He guessed there were more on the opposite side.

So that was why it had spat out so many fighters. It'd had a couple hanger bays added. Just like the ships he'd dealt with in his escape from Grievous just before knocking out Skytop.

Anakin made a mental note to tell that to the Jedi Council when he returned. The Seppies always seemed to have something new up their grimy sleeves.

Suddenly, Anakin noticed something. Sitting inside the hole, stark white against the blacks and other dark colors of the destroyed battle plate and decks, lay a craft. Anakin couldn't get a good look at it, but he guessed its purpose.

A boarding craft. And he had a pretty good idea where from.

Anakin sprang into action, his mind made up by the sight of the craft attached to the enemy battle cruiser. He reached down and yanked the hyperdrive lever.

Whatever came next, he was going to need some backup.

* * *

Onboard the station, Sam sat in her usual chair, looking over the boring blank readings from the unknown ship and Alpha Team's transmitters and wished she was onboard with them instead of stuck here with Beta Team. Still, at least she wasn't alone. Now she had five other Spartan's to share the space with. Next to her, Edward (Spartan-313, the team's sniper) snoozed in the chair they hauled in from the _Arthur_ a couple hours ago. He jerked awake spontaneously.

"What was that?" He asked, quickly scanning the panels in front of him though his Recon permutation helmet's visor.

"What was what?" Sam asked, looking over the same boards. Then she saw it. Less than a minute ago, the Slipspace monitor had picked up a sudden burst of energy on the opposite side of the unknown vessel. She'd turned off the alarms, so she hadn't noticed it. Apparently, it had just happened again. And Edward had noticed it. Which didn't surprise her. There wasn't much the sniper missed.

Both Spartans leaned in over their panels. From what Sam could see, whatever had jumped hadn't been too big, about the size of a Longsword. Not big enough for anything threatening. But perfect for a scout craft. Sam stood up abruptly.

"Get the Chief down here now," She said, anticipation and fear mixing in her chest. "It looks like we're going to have company."


	3. Investigations

**Chapter 2**

**Investigations**

Christian's boots hit the deck below him with a loud clang. The noise echoed in the huge space, making it seem as if there was a whole platoon of Spartans boarding the ship instead of just six. The darkness of the hall pressed in on him like a living thing. Christian snapped on the tactical light on his helmet. The area around him was vast, cold, and dreary. Interestingly, it also had a breathable atmosphere, from what Christian's armor was telling him. But most importantly, it was empty. Christian sprinted away from the boarding tube as the rest of Alpha Team descended. The five Spartans under his command fanned out, sweeping the area with their own tac-lights. Their beams revealed grey, lifeless walls and strange circular doors. Still nothing moved. Christian clenched his hand into a fist and held it above his head. Alpha Team paused, awaiting orders. Christian paused, considering what to say to them. The Spartans had been given a flexible set of objectives to accomplish. The most important was to find the bridge and hopefully download any surviving data from the ship's systems. But first they needed to know where to go. Christian unsealed his suit with a _hiss_ of venting air, which echoed loudly in the room as his team followed suite, then activated his COM.

"This is Alpha Lead to Base, request an update on our current position."

"Roger that Alpha Lead." Sam's voice came back, slightly muffled by the distance and mass of damaged metal around them. "Hold on a sec…"

Christian waited. Seconds later, a wire-frame diagram of the mysterious ship appeared in his HUD. A nav point blinked where his team was. He nodded.

"Any chance you could give us the believed location of the bridge too?"

Another dot flashed into existence, blinking atop the structure that jutted from the bow of the ship.

"Thanks Base. We'll call if we need anything."

"Well keep an ear out." Sam replied.

"Glad to hear it. Alpha out."

Christian shut down his radio and examined the diagram. They seemed to be about half way along the length of the ship, on the port side. They needed to move bow-ward about 400 meters.

He pointed to Hester, who was the team's computer and electronics expert.

"Get one of these doors open." He ordered. Hester blinked her status light green in response and moved out. The Spartans pointed their lights at the door she approached and held them there as she knelt down to examine the controls. After a couple seconds, she stood back.

"It's fried. Looks like whatever knocked out the power got the doors too." She said. She shook her head, then pointed to the other three doors in the room. "Looks like the rest got nailed too."

"Then we go through the old fashioned way." Christian said. Hester nodded and stepped back. Christian waved his hand, and Coraline rushed forward eagerly, placing her MA5D on her back and yanking her crowbar free. With a grunt, she jammed it into the vertical space between the doors. The implement stuck sparks from the metal, but penetrated the gap. Whatever had deactivated the door in the first place seemed to have shorted out the internal mechanisms as well, and Coraline had little trouble prizing the door open enough for her to slip her fingers into the opening and grasp the right side panel of the door. With a heave of augmented muscle and a grate of resisting metal, she managed to haul the right side into the wall it slid out from. Coraline released the door, leaving finger-shaped dents in the metal and reattached her crowbar to her thigh. Christian nodded in approval at the now-open door, and waved his team forward. Alpha continued deeper into the darkened hallways, lights swinging in a choreographed pattern that provided maximum lighting and weapons coverage. But still nothing moved. Christian felt unsettled. On any UNSC ship of this size, there would have been almost a hundred or more personnel needed to run it. But as they traveled further into the ship, nothing stirred. Every hallway seemed to be an exact model of the one they had first entered, thought some had viewports or computer terminals. Hester's attempts to access the latter of these two features proved as futile as activating the door. The computers seemed to have been wiped by some sort of massive electrical surge. After the third failed try, Christian voiced this observation to his team.

"Probably something internal going off," Kelly noted, looking around at the metal walls that surrounded them. "I'm reading the remains of some massive rad burst that swept through here pretty recently."

"Nuke?" Matt asked, nervously fingering his SMG's forward grip. Christian understood his feeling. Nuclear weapons were one of the few things Spartans feared. Kelly shrugged and turned to Hester, who had the most sophisticated scanning equipment in her armor, befitting her role. She shook her head.

"Measurements are wrong. Looks like electromagnetic energy and not much else." She said.

"Could have been a weapon from whoever these guys were fighting." Coraline added.

"Doubt it." Said Hester. She waved her hand over a section wall, letting the sensors in her gauntlet get a good reading off the metal. "I'm reading that it came primarily from inside the ship. Looks like these walls were built to carry it too."

"Fail-safe?" Christian guessed. Hester nodded.

"That's my theory." She grunted. "Looks like we might have a bit more trouble with this than we thought we would."

"Let's hope not." Christian muttered. He motioned to his team again, and Alpha moved deeper into the silent ship's halls.

Unfortunately, fifteen minutes more of exploration proved Hester's prediction correct. Of the twelve doors Alpha passed through, seven had to be opened by Coraline's crowbar. The other five were either damaged and impassible, or partially or completely open. And the fact that the group of Spartans had to stop every time they encountered a closed door made Christian uneasy. They still hadn't seen anything living (or dead, for that matter) on the ship, but Christian still didn't like stopping. Finally, after Coraline had hauled yet another door open with brute force, he switched on his radio and contacted Sam again.

"Base, this is Alpha Lead, looks like this ship took some kinda EM burst recently. Everything's FUBAR and we're moving slower than a Warthog in shit. Please advise." He paused. After almost half a minute, Sam came back over the radio.

"Alright, just got the most recent scan from our sensors." Christian heard muttering in the background, and what sounded like a sensor running.

"Okay, here we go. Got something for you. About a hundred meters to starboard of your current position is a large empty section. Probably a cargo bay or hanger of some form. Whatever it is, it runs through quite a bit of the ship. Should speed up your rate of travel quite a bit."

"Let's hope so." Christian muttered. To Sam, he said, "Thanks again. We'll keep you posted on anything new. Alpha out." He shut down his radio again.

"So what now, boss?" Coraline asked, hefting her MA5D. Christian gestured with his hand towards starboard.

"We head deeper in. Find this "hanger" or whatever the fuck it is. Get to the bridge. Get out."

"Works for me." Coraline said, striding towards the door Christian had indicated. Alpha followed behind her.

* * *

At the very edge of Bakuran space, the blackness of space twisted, warped and stretched, snapping into the form of the _Twilight_. Anakin breathed a sigh of relief. In the back of his mind, he'd been worried that he wouldn't be able to make it back to Republic space. Thankfully, his worries had been boundless. As he relaxed, the freighter's holoprojector chimed. Anakin activated it, putting him face to face with Ahsoka's ghostly holopresence.

"Good to see you, Master." She said, baring her sharp predatory teeth as she smiled at him. Anakin was momentarily surprised, but it passed just as quickly. In the couple months he and Ahsoka had been teacher and student, he'd slowly gotten used to the physical and quirks Ahsoka exhibited relating to her species, the Togruta. Such as the relatively-pointed teeth. And her impressive natural reflexes and agility. Or her preference for bloody-rare meat, as well as the occasional live, small creature.

"Glad to know you missed me." Anakin replied, revealing none of his internal dialog.

"Was your mission successful?" She asked, looking at him quizzically. Anakin pondered his answer.

"From a certain perspective." He reached down and flipped several switches. "Open the hanger doors, I'm landing. And get in contact with Obi-Wan. He's going to want to hear what I found."

"Yes, Master." His Padawan replied. The holoform of her blinked into non-existence, and seconds later the hanger doors of the _Resolute_ slid open. Anakin steered the _Twilight _into the gap and quickly set her down in one of the magnetic containment field protected bays on either side of the trench. The freighter settled with a hiss and a clank of docking clamps, and Anakin quickly rushed to the back to disembark. The boarding ramp slid down, and Anakin practically charged out of the ship. At the bottom stood Ahsoka, waiting for him.

"Did you get Obi-Wan?" He asked, walking quickly. His Padawan had to sprint to catch up with him.

"Yes, and Master Windu as well."

"Really?" Anakin was surprised.

"They were in a meeting with Palpatine which just ended. They sound interested."

"Then let's not keep them waiting." Both Jedi broke into a sprint for the bridge.

"So you're saying these ships weren't Separatist?" The holoform of Jedi General Obi-Wan Kenobi asked. Anakin nodded in response.

"Yes, Master." He said, tapping some keys on the holotable's panel. A representation of the ships he had seen bloomed to life. "I've never seen anything like them before."

"Hmmm, neither have I." Kenobi scratched his beard in thought. "This doesn't bode well at all."

"Were they hostile in anyway, Skywalker?" Asked the holoform of General Mace Windu, the other glowing figure standing on the table. Anakin shook his head.

"No, but I don't think they saw me. They appeared to have sent a boarding craft over to the damaged frigate, though." He brought up a scan of the boarding craft and set it rotating for the two senior Jedi. Kenobi looked down at it.

"Doesn't look very advanced." He noted.

"That's what I was thinking." Anakin said. He pointed towards the ships. "When I first saw these, I thought they looked…well, archaic, for lack of a better word."

"Like a slugthrower in space." Windu said, crossing his arms.

"Yes…" Kenobi added, still in thought. "But if they are technologically advanced enough to build spaceships-"

"And space stations." Anakin added quickly. "I saw one there, in front of the two ships." He explained in response to the two other Jedi's looks of confusion.

"Very well, spacecraft and stations, then they are most likely advanced enough to have complex computers…"

"Which means they might crack that damaged frigates memory banks." Windu finished. "Or slice into one of the droids that was one board."

"Precisely." Kenobi said.

"Um, no offense, Masters," Ahsoka said, raising her hand tentatively. The three other Jedi turned their attention to the Padawan, who hadn't spoken since the briefing started. "But why does it matter if they do? They might not even be able to understand anything they find. And if they do, so what? What's it matter to us?"

"It matters, Ahsoka," Kenobi said patiently. "Because if they get the right information, they could become our enemies."

"We're already stretched thin as it is." Windu added. "We don't need another force to fight against."

"Oh." The Togruta said, falling silent. Anakin, however, took up the conversation.

"So what do we do?" He asked. The elder Jedi paused, then bent their heads in a quick conversation. They broke apart and Windu turned to Anakin.

"We need to alert the Supreme Chancellor of this finding." He said.

"Stand by until we return, Anakin. Hopefully Palpatine will have an answer to this problem." He nodded to Anakin and Kenobi, then walked out of the holoprojector's range.

"Yes, Masters." Anakin said. Kenobi nodded to him, and Anakin was just about to shut the holoprojector down when the air was rent with the sounds of clone armor on deck plating. Turning, he found himself face-to-face with his second in command, the clone Captain Rex.

"Generals, our sensors just picked up a group of incoming vessels. Readings match those of a _Lucrehulk_-class command ship and group of frigates." The clone said, snapping a salute. Anakin's mouth fell open.

"What?" He gasped. The last time he'd faced that many ships was during the battle over Ryloth. Why in the Seven Corellian Hells were the Separatists sending that much firepower to an out of the way system like Bakura?

"Anakin?" Kenobi asked from behind him. "What's going on?"

"Looks like the clankers didn't take to kindly to us trashing their fleet." Anakin replied quickly. "They've sent reinforcements."

"I'll be there as soon as I can. Just try and stay alive." Kenobi's voice took on an edge of urgency, and he turned away from the holoprojector to converse with his Commander, Cody. He was about to say something else, but suddenly the alarms on the _Resolute_'s bridge rang out. Anakin stared at the tactical map in front of him as multiple enemy ships suddenly dropped out of hyperspace.

"Could be a problem, Master." He said. "They've just arrived."

"Then get out of there! There's nothing more you can do!" Kenobi ordered.

"We can't!" Ahsoka shouted from her position by one of the sensor readout panels, where she had moved to when Rex had reported the incoming ships. "They've cut off all the hyperlanes out of here!"

"Then we need to-" The rest of what Anakin was going to say was cut off as he got another look at the tactical screen. To his amazement, the Separatist ships completely ignored his fleet, and turned towards the blackness beyond the planet. Anakin suddenly felt like he'd been doused with super-cooled water. There was only one thing the enemy could be doing:

The droid ships were going after the lost ship.

And sure enough, one by one, the enemy ship's soared past Anakin's Star Destroyers, engaged their hyperdrives, and shot off into the blackness.

Anakin was speechless for a moment, then turned back to his Master.

"We've got trouble." He said. "Looks like the clankers want their ship back."

"You don't mean-" Kenobi began.

"I do." Said Anakin.

"You have to stop them! If they get through, who knows what could happen! " Kenobi's voice had taken on an almost pleading quality.

"I know." Anakin lowered his head. "I won't let them."

"Good. I'll be there when I can."

"Yes Master." Anakin turned from the projector and started to walk towards the viewports at the head of the bridge, but Kenobi stopped him.

"May the Force be with you." He said quietly. Anakin nodded.

"And you, Master."

The holoprojector shut down with a warble. Anakin continued his walk towards the bridge, Ahsoka falling into step beside him.

"Get me Admiral Yularen." Anakin told his student. "Tell him to prepare to jump to lightspeed. Use the coordinates from the _Twilight_. We've got a clanker fleet to stop."

"Yes Master." Ahsoka said, quickly hurrying off to complete her task. Anakin stood at the middle viewport and watched the stars.

Minutes later, the three Venator Star Destroyers turned towards the area the Separatist ships had disappeared into, engaged their hyperdrives, and jumped towards the unknown system.

Thought none of the people involved knew it, they were about to change the course of the entire Clone Wars.

* * *

Deep within the bowels of the mysterious ship, Alpha Team finally found the "hanger" Christian had been told of. What Sam had said had been an understatement, he decided. The "hanger" was enormous. An entire squadron of Longswords could have easily fit wingtip to wingtip across it's width.

"Whoa." Matt said, looking down the huge, dark bay stretching away from them in both directions. The sheer size of the room ate up most of the sound he made.

"Word to that." Said Kelly.

"Enough gaping," Hester scolded. "We have a job to do, remember?"

"We're doing it, aren't we?" Kelly shot back. Christian sighed.

"Stow the crap." He barked. Both female Spartans shut up. Christian was about chew them out when Echo's status light blinked orange. Instantly, every Spartan raised their weapons, looking for any problems. But a quick check showed the enormous space was empty except for themselves. Christian wondered once again where the crew of the ship were, but was quickly distracted by the site of Echo waving one of her arms. The Spartans sprinted over. When they arrived, all received a nasty shock;

The arm Echo was waving wasn't hers.

Echo waved the arm again, and Christian got a better look at it. It was thin, skeletal like, and made of some kind of metal. It was colored light brown, and at the end were two blocky fingers and a thumb. At the other end was a ragged-looking cut across the entire width of the arm. It seemed as if it had been cut from its owner by something very hot, but uneven. Christian guessed some kind of blast, probably originating in the battle the ship had fled from.

"What is it?" Kelly asked, looking at it in amazement.

"Looks like a robot arm." Hester added, reaching for it. Echo yanked it back quickly. Hester stepped back. Apparently, Echo wanted to keep it. Which made sense, at least to Christian. Echo was like that. She kept trophies. Most of the Spartan-IV's did, but Echo was really into it. One entire wall of her quarters was covered with her spoils, despite most of the UNSC's rules looking down on such collecting.

Christian was about to order Echo to hand over the arm when Matt called out to him.

"Found something here, boss!" He shouted. "Looks like a switch of some kind."

"Don't touch it!" Christian shouted back. "We don't know-"

He was cut off as, with a loud snapping noise and a lot of metallic clanking, the hanger was suddenly filled with light. Alpha Team recoiled as their visors polarized to protect their eyes. They quickly recovered,

"What did I tell you?" Christian shouted to Matt.

"I didn't touch it!" Matt replied. "It just turned on by itself!"

"Guys, you might want to look around…" Coraline said. Christian noticed she had a disturbing edge to her voice. The Spartan-IV's complied, only to be shocked yet again by the now-visible interior of the room.

Surrounding them were hundreds of long, roughly cylindrical racks of some kind. At first, Christian thought they were parts of starships or vehicles. But a closer look revealed that, hanging from within them, were what looked like suits or armor. Christian noted that they were the same color as the arm Echo had found. In fact, most of them seemed to have identical arms…

"What the hell are these things?" He said aloud.

"Not a clue." Hester answered quietly.

"You think these might be the crew?" Coraline said, backing away from the closest of the racks. Christian though this seemed like a good idea, and motioned for Alpha Team to form up. They did so gladly.

"Let's not find out, shall we?" Matt said, raising his SMG. The rest of the group nodded.

Unfortunately, luck seemed to be against them, as, seconds after forming into a group, the air around them was filled with the groan of machines moving and the clanking of whatever the hell was hanging from the racks being lowered to the floor. Alpha Team watched in part amazement, part fear, as the things unfolded themselves, stood up, and pulled what looked disturbingly like guns from their shoulders. Now that he could get a good look at them, Christian realized these things had a back pack of some form on, with antennae sprouting from it. They were skinny, with bone-like arms and legs.

They were robots, Christian realized. Nasty looking advanced robots. With guns.

"Well this just keeps getting better and better." Christian spat.

Alpha Team stood ready, but for several moments, nothing happened. The robots simply stood there, guns at the ready. After almost two minutes, Coraline hesitantly moved forward. Instantly, one of the metallic heads focused on her. Coraline froze, but the robot had seen her.

"Hey, intruders!" It said, in a rather comical-sounding tinny voice. Christian was only slightly surprised that it spoke English.

"What should we do?" The one next to the first talker said.

"Blast them!" Said a third. Apparently this was considered a good idea by the rest of the robots, as the air was suddenly filled with bolts of red light.

"Run!" Christian bellowed, leading his team towards a large cluster of durable-looking crates. As he threw himself behind one of them, Battle Rifle in hand, one thought echoed through his mind;

_What the hell is going on?_


	4. Confrontation

**Chapter 3**

**Confrontation**

With a flash of other-dimensional light, the three Star Destroyers formerly protecting Bakura dropped back into the blackness of space. With a surge of power, they brought up their shields. Turbolasers rotated in their turret wells, readying for a broadside. Quad laser batteries swiveled up. As per Anakin's orders, the three Destroyers were ready to deal a crippling blow to the Separatist fleet before they could make contact with the unknown ships.

Unfortunately, the Seppies weren't there.

Standing on the bridge of the _Resolute_, Anakin was dumbfounded. He scanned the readouts in front of him, looking for any sign of the enemy. Just the sensor readings of the _Emancipator _and the _Gualara_. For that matter, there wasn't any sign of the unknown ships, either.

_We must have miss-jumped_, He thought. _We made a small error when we headed out, but because it's so far..._

He turned to Yularen, who was standing next to him, hands clasped behind back.

"Get me a sensor sweep of everything within a three parsec radius of us." Anakin ordered. "Check for engine emissions, communications, whatever would show there's a ship there."

"Yes sir." Yularen said. He walked off to the sensor station to relay Anakin's orders. Anakin turned back to the viewport and looked out. Arrayed before him was a huge expanse of stars, glittering like corusca gems on black velvet.

Beautiful.

A stirring in the Force announced the arrival of Ahsoka.

"So, where's the clankers?" She asked. Anakin shook his head in response.

"Don't know. But I sure hope to find out."

Behind the two Jedi, Yularen cleared his throat.

"We have them, General." He said, walking forward and bringing up a sensor screen on the tactical map behind the three of them. "We have strong readings in this sector."

He highlighted an area less than a fourth of a parsec from their current position.

"Then what are we waiting for?" Ahsoka asked. Anakin could feel her excitement through the Force.

"What indeed." He said quietly. He turned to Yularen.

"Plot us a course, and keep the guns online. We're gonna need them."

Yularen nodded, and gave the order. Seconds later, the three Destroyers turned to a new course and once again jumped into hyperspace.

* * *

Within the hanger of the now-active unknown ship, Alpha Team was hiding for their life. In front of them, the metal boxes they were using as cover rang with the constant pounding they were receiving. The insistent _spang_ of the robots strange ammunition hitting them sounded to Christian's augmented ears like a mechanical rain.

"What the fuck is this shit?" Kelly shouted as a stray red bolt zipped by her head. It slammed into the wall behind her and blew a small hole in it, which smoked.

"Looks like some advanced form of plasma. Or laser." Hester noted, ducking her head to present a smaller target. Alpha Team's armor had shields, but none of them really wanted to test how effective they would be against this new weapon.

"And I thought the Covie's had nasty guns!" Kelly shouted back to Hester. She dodged a couple more bolts.

"What do we do, boss?" Coraline asked. Christian noticed there was an edge in her voice, and her fingers were squeezing her gun's grip.

"Hold your fire." Christian paused to duck as several bolts flew over his head. "We don't have weapons clearance." He moved to suit his words, removing his finger from his Battle Rifle's trigger.

"You sure that's a good idea?" Matt asked in surprise. He unconsciously looked over his SMG's caseless ammunition feed, something he did when he was nervous or anxious.

"Well, they aren't charging us, are they?" Christian pointed towards the origin of the incoming fire. A quick check confirmed that, as he had said, the robots were simply standing in place, firing nonstop at the cover before the Spartans.

"Sure are dumb for robots." Kelly quipped. Next to her, Echo rapped her gauntleted hand on her helmet twice, the hand sign for _brainless_. She apparently agreed with Kelly's conclusion.

"Alright, but what _do_ we do about them? We can't hide here for ever." Coraline said, checking between two crates.

Christian thought for a second. "We could try diplomacy." He said finally. The Spartans looked at each other.

"You really wanna try talking with a bunch of trigger-happy robots?" Kelly said, shocked. Christian guessed that, could he see her face, she would have raised her eyebrows. He shrugged in response.

"It's what the First Contact Directives say." Christian said.

"But those came out before the Covenant showed up! They didn't really want to talk!" Kelly seemed even angrier now.

"Well, this is a different situation. Maybe-"

Christian paused. His COM was beeping. He activated it.

"This is Alpha Lead, go ahead, but make it fast!" He shouted.

"Alpha Lead, this is Juliet, requesting a report on your mission progress." A cool female voice answered through Christian's earpiece. It took the Spartan a moment to remember who was talking.

Juliet was the artificial intelligence aboard the_ Kelly_, one of the newer generations of "smart" AI's. She'd been tasked with providing infiltration and electronic assistance for them on this mission, similar to how the famous team of Cortana and the Master Chief had worked, in addition to her duties on the _Kelly_. But so far Alpha Team hadn't required her services. Being linked to their data feeds, however, Christian guessed she'd noticed something was wrong.

"We're up to our necks in shit here, and it's getting higher by the second!" He shouted back. "We're pinned down by unknown contacts! Permission to engage?"

"Are they hostile?" Juliet asked, still calm. Christian had a sudden urge to chew her out for asking dumb questions, but then realized that it probably would be a useless gesture to try and correct her, and she was probably just being thorough. When it came to these kinds of situations, it didn't pay to shoot first, ask questions later.

"Can't really tell, they're robots." Christian said. "But they're shooting at us, that's for sure. Fuck!" The last comment came as a stray beam slammed into his shoulder. His shield's shimmered and dropped to about three quarters, but held.

"Hold on, Alpha Lead. I'm gonna check with the brass." The COM fell dead, and Christian couldn't do anything but move himself back into the cover of the boxes behind him. The rest of the Spartans looked at him. He was about to say something when Juliet came back over his COM.

"Alpha Lead, all weapons free, repeat, all weapons free. Smoke 'em good." She said quickly. Christian smiled, and gripped his Battle Rifle.

"Roger that." He replied.

"Also, new update," Juliet added. "You need to get to the bridge and get what you can by any means necessary, with emphasis on the any."

"Can do. Alpha Lead out." He cut the COM and turned to his team. "Let's kick some metal ass, Alpha!" He shouted.

"Fuck yeah!" Coraline yelled in response. The rest of the group shouted affirmatives along similar lines.

"On three, we hit them." Christian raised himself slightly and gripped his Battle Rifle, flipping the firing mode to single shot. "One..."

Alpha Team stood and the few who had their safeties on flipped them off.

"Two…"

Echo moved slightly forward and stuck the barrel of her shotgun through the space in the crates. Kelly moved backwards and sighted over one of the crates. Hester knelt behind Echo and aimed her pistols over her head. Coraline gripped her assault rifle. Finally, Matt checked the silencer on his SMG and pressed the stock to his shoulder.

"Three!"

Alpha Team moved as one, rising and engaging the enemy.

Christian fired first, his Battle Rifle cracking and spitting 10x40mm Ultra-High-Powered Semi-Armor-Piercing rounds at the robots. The Rifle's recoil slammed into him with enough force to dislocate a normal humans' shoulder. Christian's augmented muscles held it steady. His first three shots bounced off the blocky chest of the target closest to him, seemingly without doing any damage, but the fourth caught it's strange, sloped head and sheered it clear off in a burst of static. The robot fell backward, the place where its head had been sparking and its rifle firing a pair of shots into the ceiling.

_Guess they aren't that tough_, Christian thought. He sighted the next robot's head, but Echo got it first. With a blast of blue energy and yellow fire, her shotgun propelled a deadly mixture of 6-gauge metal buckshot surrounded by a cocoon of plasma, which increased both the range and damage of the metal pellets. The robot she and Christian had both been aiming for caught the round in the chest, and the plasma containing the buckshot dispersed instantly in a blast of heat and broad-spectrum radiation, weakening the metal it came into contact with just enough for the buckshot to punch through it. The robot fell, a large smoking and sparking hole in its middle. Another robot fell beside it, dropped by accurate fire from Hester's dual M6D's. 12.7mm High Explosive rounds sang through the air from the two pistols and slammed into the next robot in line and quickly brought it down as well. To Christian's left, Coraline's MA5D roared, spitting its load of fifty newly developed 7.62mm armor piercing anti-personnel rounds full automatic, twenty rounds per second, into the robots before her. Several jerked like marionettes with plucked strings as their armor deflecting the torrent of hardened full metal jacket rounds, before violently succumbing to them. They fell with a clatter, joining the spent brass casings that continued to spew from Coraline's rifle.

"Damn." Christian heard Matt curse. He turned to see the Spartan slap a fresh magazine into his SMG. Two spent ones lay on the ground next to him. One robot lay destroyed less than half a meter away. Apparently, the SMG's 5mm rounds didn't work too well against these new enemies.

"Ditch the bullet hose!" Christian ordered. "Use one of Hester's pistols!"

"Yes sir!" Matt acknowledged. He slapped the SMG onto his thigh plate and took the High Explosive pistol that Hester quickly offered him. This was a maneuver the team had practiced before, and the weapon switch occurred without a serious break in their fire rate. Matt quickly steadied his new weapon, and seconds later dropped a pair of robots with five well aimed shots. He paused to slide a new mag into the pistol's grip.

His cry of "Reloading!" was drowned out, however, as the last member of Alpha Team joined the combat. With a loud _crack_ that echoed through the empty space above the Spartans and made Christian's ears ring, Kelly fired a 20mm High Explosive Anti-Personnel Hyper-Sonic Fin Stabilized Discarding Sabot sniper round into the line of robots. The round screamed through the air, leaving a vapor trail behind it, and connected with the first robot in the column of them just ahead of Kelly's position. The bullet tore through the unfortunate machine, literally ripping it in half with the momentum of twenty millimeters of hardened metal traveling almost three times the speed of sound, and kept on going. It easily cut through the entire line of robots, and slammed into the wall on the other side of the hanger, where it gouged a head-sized chunk out of it.

The rest of Alpha Team paused in their firing to look at Kelly, who stood calmly behind

Hester, smoking sniper rifle pressed to her shoulder. There was a resounding _thunk-clink _as the rifle cycled another massive round into the chamber.

"Guess that's why they call the E model the 'Spartan Sniper'" Kelly said dryly. She rolled her shoulder and grunted. "Damn."

"It's firing a 20mm round, Kelly." Said Coraline. "What do you expect?"

"Well, it looks like it got the job done. They've stopped firing." Matt said, pointing towards the enemy lines. Christian paused and risked a glance at the robots. They were still, looking at the huge hole in their lines caused by the 20mm round.

"What was that?" One of them said. The robots around it answered along the lines of "I don't know."

"Well, I'd say that'll shut up the brass who were bellyaching about it being so expensive." Hester noted, joining Christian.

"True." Kelly said. The Spartans paused. Christian clenched his fist to get their attention.

"Come on. Lets get out of here while they're distracted." He waved his group forward, but unfortunately his hope that the robots would stay distracted for a bit was false. Seconds after Alpha started running, they once again open fire, forcing the Spartans into fresh cover. But this time, Alpha could fight back. And they did. More robots fell, and Christian waved his team forward.

"Fire in the hole!" Coraline bellowed. There was a _thump_ as she fired her rifle's grenade launcher, followed by the sounds of the grenade blowing all the machines in front of Alpha to hell. Seeing an opening, Christian charged in, his team right behind him. As they charged, a shudder ran though the hull of the ship. Alpha paused, but continued after it stopped.

They had a mission to complete.

* * *

With a flash of light, normal space resolved itself around the bridge of the _Resolute_. Behind it, Anakin quickly studied the scene before him. The ships still hung in space, where they had been before. The station was still there as well. Apparently, the CIS fleet hadn't arrived. Which left him free to act as he saw fit.

But, the question was, how should he act?

The most prominent thing to do would be to blow the frigate to vacuum. Simple, clean, and with no worries about casualties. But that would send up a signal flare for the two ships near the gas giant that he was there. And there was the fact that a team from them might be aboard. Anakin doubted that whoever was on the ships wouldn't take too kindly to having their personnel blown up.

He could have some of the Y-Wings in the _Resolute_'s hanger drop some EM torpedo's on it, and hopefully erase any information that might be onboard, but that too would show his position. And, again, it might hit whoever was on board.

Anakin grit his teeth in frustration. He leaned against the viewport and sighed. Footsteps echoed behind him. Ahsoka, fresh from the quick nap she had taken during the trip here.

"Something wrong, Skyguy?" She asked. Anakin straightened up.

"Just trying to figure out what to do." He stretched. He probably should have gotten some sleep like Ahsoka had. But duty came first. Checking in the viewport before him, Anakin could see she was holding something.

"You gonna be long?" The Togruta probed. "It's been ages since I've been able to walk barefoot."

"Huh?" Was Anakin's response. He turned to face his Padawan. Ahsoka smiled sheepishly and shrugged, holding up both hands, each which held one of her boots.

"Oh, right. The whole walking barefoot thing." Anakin said. Another one of Ahsoka's quirks. Though he'd noticed Master Shaak Ti seemed to enjoy it as well, so maybe it was Togruta's in general.

"Yeah. Kinda hard to do it when you're shutting down tinnies." Ahsoka cut into Anakin's thought process. The Jedi Knight nodded.

"True." He said. "But it looks like you might get your fill. There's not much we can do about that ship until that boarding party gets off. And even then we can't do anything until those ships leave."

"Why don't we just board it ourselves and take care of it?" Ahsoka asked. Anakin started to tell her it was ridiculous, before realizing that it actually wasn't. With a little adjustment…

"I shouldn't have said that, should I?" Ahsoka asked, face falling. Her shoulder's slumped.

"Probably not." Anakin said. He brought his gauntlet up to his face and activated his comlink.

"Rex, you there?" He asked.

"I'm here, General." The clone Captain's voice filtered through the comlink's speaker. "What's up?"

"Get a team together. We're going to board that ship."

"Sir?" Rex sounded surprised. Anakin found he couldn't blame him.

"That's an order, Captain."

"Yes sir. I'll get right on it." Rex broke the connection. Anakin lowered his gauntlet and looked at Ahsoka, who was busy putting her boots back on.

"I knew I shouldn't have said anything." She muttered.

"Yeah, well too late now." Anakin pulled his Padawan to her feet, then turned for the hall. Ahsoka growled in frustration as she watched him go.

"Well, better get this over with," She thought, before following her Master to the hanger bay.

Five minutes later, Anakin stood before the team of seven clones Rex had assembled for the boarding. He scanned the group, before nodding his approval.

The first two clones Anakin recognized. Echo and Fives, the only two survivors of Domino Squad, the rookie clone outfit assigned to the Rishi Outpost, a status signified by the Repeating Blaster Cannon painted on their armor's shoulders. The two former "shinies" had racked up quite a few more honors since their entrance to the 501st Legion, including several for bravery, and had just recently begun the grueling training regiment that would make them into Advanced Recon Commandos, better known as ARC Troopers, as a reward for their service during the recent Battle of Kamino. They were good all around fighters, tough and willing to do what was necessary. Perfect for this mission.

The next two Anakin didn't know. Rex introduced them as Waxer and Boil. Both were scouts, according to the Captain, from Ghost Company of the 212st Attack Battalion, under Commander Cody. Boil also apparently doubled as a heavy weapons expert, which explained the rocket launcher he had strapped on his back. Anakin nodded to them and continued.

The final members of the group were Rex's personal squad, as designated by the personalized armor and helmets. Rex introduced them as Kix, Jessie, and Hardcase. Jessie was a slicer, Kix a medic, and Hardcase demolitions. All specialties they'd need on board. Anakin turned to Rex.

"Well done, Captain. Excellent squad."

"Thank you, sir." The clone replied. "They'll follow orders, that's for sure."

"Yours as well as mine, I assume." The Jedi stepped back from Rex to look observe the movement of the LAAT/i dropship they were going to use to board the frigate.

"Of course." Rex replied. "Wouldn't give up a chance to blast droids for anything."

"Glad to hear it." He turned to the assembled troopers. "Grab your gear and mount up," He ordered, pointing towards the waiting gunship. "We're leaving in five."

"Sir, yes sir!" The clones shouted in unison. All grabbed whatever they had with them and climbed into the gunships bay. Rex, Anakin and Ahsoka followed. The moment the last Republic soldier was on board, the gunships blast shields closed and it soared out into the frigid blackness of space.

* * *

"More, incoming on our six!"

Hester's yell of warning startled Christian, who was focused on the robots before him. Cursing, he slammed his Battle Rifle into the metal figure before him, knocking it's head clean off in a shower of sparks, then grabbed the jerking body and spun around with it between him and the approaching targets, the metal absorbing their hail of fire. He fired his Battle Rifle one-handed, knocking down several robots before the magazine ran dry. He chucked the now-holed impromptu shield at the rest of the robots and ducked under the cover of a large pipe. Alpha Team had managed to fight their way through most of the ship, but everywhere they went there seemed to be more enemies for them to kill. Now, inside what Hester had identified as a communications array, they had found what could only be described as an army. For every one metal freak they knocked down, two more seemed to take their place. Christian dropped his now-empty mag and loaded a fresh one. A quick check showed it was his second to last one. He cursed again, and switched his Battle Rifle back to single-shot mode, having switched to burst when the fighting got intense. A fragmentation grenade detonate nearby, blowing apart several robots and showering metal chunks everywhere.

"Dry on frags!" Coraline shouted from behind Christian. "Switching to plasma!"

"Affirmative!" Christian replied. "Get ready to lay down covering fire! We're gonna-"

He was cut off by the sudden, violent destruction of the pipe he was hiding behind. Time seemed to slow for Alpha Team's leader as his enhanced reflexes kicked in. Chunks of metal whirled in the air before him, spinning gracefully. A pall of fire soared out to meet him, moving as if through water. Normally, Christian would have been worried. But he was in Spartan Time now. Nothing could worry him. Even as he spun through the air, he reached out and tapped a piece of debris, altering its flight path.

Time sped up again. Christian hit the ground and rolled. Came up with his gun at the ready.

"What the fuck is that?" Kelly shouted from Christian's left, pointing towards the door Alpha Team had come through earlier. Emerging from it was something huge, metallic, and dark. In stepped into the light, giving the Spartan's a good look at it.

"Oh, _shit_." Matt whispered.

The new arrival was one of the robots. It was huge, easily taller than any of the Spartans, but not by more than a couple inches. It's skin was some kind of shiny armor plate. It reminded Christian of the shields carried by Hunters. It had not neck, just a small bump with what looked like eyes on it in the center of it's huge mushroom shaped torso. It's legs were spindly, but powerful looking. On it's right arm were a pair of tubes and a club-like hand. This was raised, and Christian guessed whatever had taken out his cover had come from those tubes.

"Fuck, that thing's gonna eat us alive!" Coraline shouted.

"Then take it out!" Hester replied. Christian nodded at his teammate, and simultaneously Alpha opened fire on the new contact.

The armor proved as tough as it looked. The only thing that managed to get through was Kelly's 20mm round. Everything else bounced off. And even the sniper round didn't take it down. It just passed through, blowing a good-sized hole on it's way and showering the robots behind the massive one with debris.

"Matt, Hester, Kelly, Helljumper Slam!" Christian bellowed. The three chosen Spartans blinked their status lights green in acknowledgment, then Matt and Hester holstered their weapons and, with dual cries of rage, sprinted for the robots legs.

The Helljumper Slam (Sometimes called the ODST Takedown), was a maneuver originally developed by the UNSC's Orbital Drop Shock Troopers for taking down large, tough enemies. Many a Brute Chieftain and Elite Zealot fell to it. The Slam itself consisted of two Troopers charging at the target's legs or midsection, and forcing it to the ground. A third soldier then jumped onto the target's chest and took it out with several well placed shots to the head or a quick knife to the neck.

Hester and Matt charged. They crashed into the target's steel-colored legs with enough force to dent them. The robot teetered for a moment, attempting to regain its balance. But nothing, not living or machine, can take half a ton of Spartan and armor slamming into it at thirty kilometers per hour, let alone two Spartans. The towering machine fell with a groan. Kelly surged forward as it did, jumping onto it's torso with sniper rifle at the ready. A single ear-ringing shot later and the robot stopped moving.

Everything seemed to stop. The three Spartans paused to catch their breath. The few robots till standing looked in amazement at the humans.

"Wow." Said one. "They took out the boss."

"Who's in charge now?" Asked the one next to it. This started a chorus of negatives from the surrounding troops. Christian decided to move while they were distracted. He signaled Alpha, and the Spartans quickly followed him. The room they stepped into was empty. Coraline slammed the door behind them and bent the locking mechanism, before slumping against it.

"Damn, I hope we don't run into any more of those." Hester gasped, joining Coraline. The other Spartans agreed.

"Let's just get to the bridge." Christian said. He moved down a relatively long hall towards one of the doors at its end. It opened, and, to all of Alpha's great surprise, they found themselves entering a large, open room with greenish lighting and huge glass-like windows looking out into space. Stations filled most of the room.

Alpha Team had made its way to the bridge.

"Well, that was lucky." Kelly noted.

"Then let's not push our luck." Christian pointed to one of the stations. "Lets get to work."

* * *

The communications center that Alpha Team had just vacated fell silent. The few remaining droids left, leaving the Slammed Super Battle Droid behind with their fallen allies. They clanked down the hall, blaster rifles held ready, looking for any more intruders.

"So, do you think those were Republic troops back there?" Asked one.

"I don't know," Replied another. "But they sure took out 3442 fast."

"Roger roger." Answered most of the droids in the group.

"I hope we don't run into any-" Began another, but stopped as a _snap-hiss_ echoed off the walls. The droids stopped.

"What was that?" Asked the one that had first spoke. The one next to it was about to reply when it's head (and, to a lesser extent, it's sentence) was suddenly and brutally severed by a flash of blue light. The rest of the droids had no time to respond before a green flash joined the blue in chopping droids to bits. The few that escaped the cascade of energy were cut down by a wave of well-placed blaster bolts. As the last fell, the hall became silent once more.

"Nicely done, men." A male voice spoke from the gloom. The owner stepped into the light, reveling it to be Anakin. The Jedi Knight deactivated his lightsaber and stored it on his belt.

"Hey, I helped too?" Ahsoka pouted, joining her Master. Anakin smiled.

"Sure you did, Snips." He walked down along the hall, stepping over the remains of the droids he'd just deactivated. Ahsoka, Rex, and the boarding team followed behind.

"Which way to the bridge?" Anakin asked Rex. Rex shrugged and pointed at Jessie, who quickly pulled out his datapad and scanned it.

"It's a couple dozen meters…that way." The clone said, pointing to the right of Anakin. The Jedi broke into a sprint, followed closely by his team.

"I don't see any sign of the other party," Waxer noted.

"Good. Maybe we just might get through this without-" Ahsoka began, but stopped when the group reached the door to the bridge. Anakin waved it open, and got two steps in before stopping in surprise. The Togruta and the clones did the same.

The bridge wasn't empty. Scattered around it were six soldiers wearing strange armor. All looked at the Republic troops as they entered.

"-Running into them." Ahsoka finished.

Silence filled the bridge. Then, in a single moment, every single person there went for their weapons. Safeties disengaged, power packs activated, and the Jedi powered up their lightsabers. Silence reigned again as they finished. Then, simultaneously, Anakin and one of the unknown soldiers spoke at the same time.

"Who are you?"


	5. Alliance

**Chapter 4**

**Alliance**

"Lets get to work." Said Christian, stepping onto the bridge. It was pretty good sized, but smaller than most of the newer UNSC ships bridges. It had three levels, each connected by stair, and its primary colors seemed to be a bioluminescent green and black, as if the people who had designed it had simply chosen the cheapest shades available to color the bridge.

"And I thought Covenant bridges were weird looking." Coraline said, shouldering her Assault Rifle and looking around.

"At least it has windows." Kelly responded, noting the fact that most Covenant bridges were deep inside their ship's hulls.

Hester ignored the group and quickly moved to the biggest, most important looking terminal on the bridge. She kneeled down before it and began looking for a way to activate it. Coraline holstered her weapons and vaulted a small terminal to reach the lowest level of stations. Matt placed his borrowed pistol next to Hester and looked out one of the viewports. Kelly and Echo set up positions near the bridge door, shotgun and sniper rifle at the ready. Christian holstered his Battle Rifle and moved to the large chair in the middle of the bridge, which he guessed was the command seat. He examined it. It didn't seem to be the most comfortable thing ever. Unlike UNSC "hot seats", it wasn't padded, and the back seemed to be in a permanent reclining position. The back itself looked like it had been made from the ribcage of some huge alien creature. Christian wondered who would actually sit in such a thing. Which in turn started him wondering why he hadn't seen anything living on this ship aside from his team. To his right, Hester cursed.

"Something wrong, Het?" He asked, using the name Hester had received in boot camp for an incident where one of their fellow trainees had mistaken her for a lesbian. Hester stiffened, and Christian could have sworn he could smell blood on shower tiles. She relaxed again.

"It's the terminal, sir." She responded. "I think it basically told me to fuck off."

"No luck hacking it, then?" Christian asked sarcastically. Hester shook her head.

"Sorry." She apologized. Christian moved to her side and placed a gauntleted hand on her shoulder place.

"You did your best," He said. "But you're still only human."

"Not really," Hester said, turning to face her boss. She still managed to keep Christian's hand on her shoulder. "We're Spartans, so technically-"

"I mean that you're still partially human. As opposed to those robots we scrapped earlier."

"Oh." Hester paused. "Thanks, I guess."

"You're welcome." Christian let go of Hester's shoulder and raised it to his helmet. He activated his COM.

"This is Alpha Lead calling Juliet, come in." He spoke to the dead air of the bridge. Seconds later, the _Kelly_'s AI replied, her transmission filled with static.

"I…ead…lpa Lead." She said. Christian. "Go…ome kind of…terferan…"

"That's affirmative for my end as well." The Spartan replied. "You're breaking up something bad."

"…chang…a new…and." Christian's COM went silent as Juliet finished her sentence. This persisted for thirty seconds or so, before she came back on again, this time loud and clear. "Alright, got it. Sorry about that. Ever since that ship went online, we've been getting weird EM spikes from all over."

"Probably battle damage." Christian suggested. He imagined Juliet shrugging.

"So, what can I do for you?" The AI asked.

"Hester can't hack the ships systems. Any chance you could help?"

"Negative, Alpha Lead. The _Kelly_'s gone to Combat Alert Alpha. Beta Team just got a rad spike in the outer limits of the system. Looks like we have incoming. I'm needed here."

"Affirmative." Christian grit his teeth. "You need us back?"  
"Negative as well. Your orders still stand. We can handle…hold on." Juliet cut off. Christian blinked.

"Well?" Hester asked, turning around to face him.

"Juliet can't help."

"Fuck." The girl swore. "I guess I could try again."

"Don't bother." Christian started to say, but he was cut off as his COM activated.

"Juliet to Alpha Lead, come in."

"This is Alpha Lead, go ahead." Christian moved back from Hester's chair.

"I just got the green light from the Captain," The AI said. "I'm needed, but our secondary AI isn't. She's asking if you need her."

_Oh, right,_ Christian thought. _Spartan-class ships have two AI's. Forgot about that_.

"Is she any good at hacking?" He asked out loud.

"It's all she does, Chief." The Spartan could almost hear the smirk on Juliet's face. He was wondering how the AI would get across when another thought struck him.

"Wait, what do you mean by asking?" He said.

"Well, she basically threatened to jack our communications system and go across herself if we didn't let her." Juliet replied. Christian smiled inside his helmet. An enthusiastic hacking AI. The best kind.

"Send her over."

"Affirmative." In the background of Juliet's transmission, Christian could have sworn he heard someone chanting "Come on," over and over again.

"Initiating neural transfer." Juliet said. Christian started.

"Wait, what…?" He began. His sentence was cut short when a sudden burst of pain shot through his skull. He involuntarily gripped the chair Hester was sitting in hard enough to dent it. The pain left, replaced by something almost as bad; a cold, liquid feeling, as if someone had dumped liquid nitrogen into his mind. Seconds later, that left as well.

"You okay, boss?" Kelly asked from behind him. Christian turned to see the team's sniper looking at him, Recon helmet masking what was probably a look of concern. He nodded.

"Neural transfer." Christian elaborated. "You know how they feel. I'm fine."

"Your actually better than fine." Said a new voice. Female, but not like any of the Spartans under Christian's command, or Juliet for that matter. This one was cheerful, upbeat, peppy, even. Defiantly unprofessional. Christian suddenly recognized it.

"Hello Penny." He said to the AI now residing in his mind. The voice let out a squeal of joy.

"You remember!" Penny said. Christian rolled his eyes.

"Kind of hard to forget you, after what we've been through." He said. Penny laughed.

_This is what crazy people must hear_, Christian decided. _Peppy, tween laughter._

"I heard that!" Penny called out. Christian smirked.

"Quiet." He ordered. "We have a job for you. Interested?"

"Am I interested?" Penny replied. "You know it!"

"Then get to work." Christian moved to the terminal Hester had been working on and placed his hand on it.

"Yes sir!" Penny cried. She withdrew from Christian's mind, leaving a feeling of draining fluid behind, and fell silent as she entered the ship's computer. Christian shuddered. Having an AI leave your head was almost as bad as having one come into it. The terminal's panels warmed, and seconds later the rest of the bridge turned on. There was a burst of light from a section of deck just ahead of the terminal, and a hologram appeared. Christian guessed that this was the ship's equivalent of a holotank. The hologram solidified into Penny's avatar, that of a teenage girl wearing a T-Shirt, cut-off jeans, striped leggings and tennis shoes, transparent and tinged red.

"Still using the pre-UNSC animated movie character, I see." Hester noted from the terminal's chair. Penny glared at her.

"Hey, I share the same name as her!" She growled, crossing her arms. "Christian can tell you. He was the one who suggested it."

"Which movie?" Matt asked from the viewport. Christian thought back, trying to remember.

"_Bolt_, I think." He said finally. Coraline raised herself up from the floor of the lower tier, where she'd been investigating something.

"That was the one with John Travolta as the dog, right?" She asked.

"I think so." Christian replied. Coraline nodded, satisfied.

"I liked the hamster." She said, before returning to her investigation. Christian sighed, and would have slapped his hand over his face had he not been wearing a MK VI/B helmet.

"Right, to work." Penny said, turning to Christian. "Anything you want from the system?"

"Strip it clean." Said Christian. "Get me everything you can that's in there."

"Can do. Started a couple seconds ago." Replied the AI. "Shouldn't take to long-" She paused as she came across something in her search.

"What's up?" Hester asked from the command chair. Penny's avatar raised a hand to her head, the universal AI movement for accessing a different stream of data.

"I've found the ship's internal sensors, I think." Penny waved her see-though hand and more screens came to life, this time on one of the consoles below the command seat. Christian signaled Matt to investigate. The Spartan nodded and quickly seated himself behind the screens.

"Looks like the inside of the hallway we just passed, sir." Matt reported. "And the communications center."

"Contacts?" Asked Kelly, readjusting her hands on her sniper rifle.

"Negative. Place looks as dead as when we came here." Matt reached out an experimentally tapped a button. It obviously did what he wanted, as he leaned in closer to investigate. "Wait a minute…" He trailed off, before tapping another button. He stiffened.

"Snag?" Christian asked. Alpha Team stopped doing whatever they were doing. In Spartan parlance, "snag" was the term for something unexpected. A problem.

"Maybe. I'm seeing a bunch of busted robots, but they're in an area we never went through." Matt tapped more buttons.

"Could be from whatever battle this ship ran from." Coraline suggested from beneath one of the lower tier chairs.

"Doubt it. They're still smoking. TOD looks like a couple of minutes ago. And they weren't taken out by some random overloading power conduit either. The damage is too clean."

"You think they were shot?" Christian asked. Matt nodded.

"That's not good." Said Kelly. Echo added her agreement by pumping her shotgun. On the terminal before Hester, a light started blinking.

"What's that flashing?" Hester asked. Penny (who'd been quietly searching the ships computers during the conversation) looked at it, before pausing to access the terminal. Her face morphed from calm to alarm.

"It's a boarding alert," She said. "We've got inbound contacts!"

"Fucking shit!" Christian spat. He whipped around from Hester and Penny and grabbed his Battle Rifle off his back. "Find cover!" He bellowed to his team. They did so.

"Contact ETA is fifteen seconds, Chief!" Penny called out.

"Hide in the computer!" Christian ordered her. "Try and raise Beta Team. We're gonna need backup!"

"Done!" The AI replied. With a burst of holographic static, her avatar dissolved as she delved deeper into the computer system. Christian was about to join his Spartans in cover when the doors of the bridge cycled open.

What came through was a shock for Alpha Team.

The new contacts weren't robots, that much was clear to Christian. There were ten of them, arranged in loose covering formation. Eight of them (the ones at the back of the formation) wore white suits of armor that resembled plastic. The remaining two stood at the front. Neither wore the armor of the ones behind them, though the one on the left had something like it on it's chest, but black. The one on the right actually looked human, which actually surprised Christian. For a moment.

The one on the left didn't. It was humanoid (two arms, two legs, a head, etc.), but it had reddish skin with white patches in several areas, including it's exposed midsection, and instead of hair a pair of what looked like tentacles came out of it's head. And unless Christian's eyes were failing (unlikely, considering the augmentations he'd been through), there were a pair of horns growing there as well.

The group entered the bridge, and stopped abruptly as they noticed Alpha Team arrayed around the bridge. Apparently, the alien had been saying something before they entered, and Christian caught the tail end of it.

"-Running into them." She (Christian guessed it was female due to the voice) said.

Christian started when he realized she was speaking Standard, the most common language used by the UNSC. Then he remembered the Covenant and how fast they had picked up human communication during the war, and forgot about it.

Silence reigned for a moment. No one moved. Then, as if someone had telepathically given an order, every soldier on the bridge drew their weapons. The Spartan's with safeties on their weapons clicked them off, and the unknown soldiers powered up the bizarre rifles they were holding. Christian's augmented ears picked up a distinct hum emanating from the guns, leading him to believe they were similar to the ones wielded by the robots they had scrapped earlier. The unarmored duo at the front of the group pulled what looked like metal tubes from their belts almost faster than the eye could follow. Seconds later, they ignited with identical _snap-hiss_es, revealing them to be some kind of Energy Sword. Or something like them. They looked nastier to Christian, like an Energy Sword on steroids. They reminded him of katanas, like the ones used by the feudal Japanese centuries before the UNSC's formation, but with blades of energy, one blue, one green.

Silence again. Now one moved. The only sounds came from the electrical humming of the bridge and the harsh breathing of the soldiers. A silence that had gone on for far too long, Christian decided.

"Who are you?" He asked the taller of the unarmored contacts, who he guessed was the leader by the way the rest of the group glanced at him. Strangely, the person he was asking chose that exact time to ask the same thing back at him.

_Well, so much for that_.

Silence fell for a third time. The soldiers on both sides shifted. Christian could almost see the tension hanging in the air between them. The alien girl looked first at the Spartans, then the soldiers behind her, and blinked.

"Well, this is awkward." She said, lowering her Energy Sword but not turning it off. The Spartans shifted their aim slightly so that all guns now pointed at her. Christian readjusted his hold on his Battle Rifle's grip.

"You really shouldn't have said that, Snips." The human standing next to replied. He kept his Sword up and his eyes on the Spartans.

"Well I didn't know that it would actually mean we would find them!" The girl exclaimed. "What are they doing here, anyway?"

Christian felt another silence approaching, grit his teeth, and decided to enter the conversation.

"Funny, I was wondering the same thing." He said, with more confidence and cool that he was really feeling. As one, the armored soldiers behind the girl and human turned to look at Christian. The girl's eyes registered surprise.

"Hey, they can talk!" She said. The human next to her rolled his eyes.

"Of course they can." He said angrily. "We picked up communications, didn't we?"

"I mean they speak Basic." The girl said, baring her teeth at the human. She turned back towards the Spartans, and Christian got a good shock.

Her teeth were pointed. Like some kind of predatory animal. He slid his finger into his Rifle's trigger guard and placed the sights of his scope directly over the girl's head. She noticed, and her mouth closed. He was about to say something, but Coraline beat him to the punch.

"Yeah, we can talk." She said, leaning forward to get a better angle with her Assault Rifle. "And we understand you. Great."

"What she said." Christian added. He turned to the human and cycled the bolt on his Battle Rifle. It made a metallic click, as he had hoped.

"Now how about you tell us what the fuck you and this weird as bucket of bolts are doing in our space. Now."

* * *

Anakin looked at the other end of the armored soldier's gun with a mixture of surprise and worry. Surprise because he was being threatened by someone wielding a slugthrower of all things, and worry because he'd seen what these guns could do to droids. Back on the _Resolute_, he'd guessed that whatever landing party had been sent over probably wouldn't be using blasters. He'd been right in that regard. And though he hadn't stated it to his team, he'd believed that this meant his group would have the tactical advantage.

Apparently, he'd been wrong.

If the complexity of their armor didn't hint at their high level of advancement, then the fact that, despite being armed with slugthrowers and what seemed to be primitive fragmentation grenades (as shown by the line of holed and shattered droids leading to the bridge), the group hadn't sustained a single casualty.

And now that same team was in control of the bridge, and the person he suspected was their leader was shoving a rather nasty looking rifle into Anakin's face.

"You heard me." He growled. "Start talking."

Anakin decided to heed his advice. No need to start a confrontation. He motioned subtly with his hand to his team.

_Stand down, stay quiet_, he signed. _Don't talk or make a move unless I order it_.

"Okay, we can talk." He said to the soldier before him, slowly and calmly. He raised his hands and deactivated his lightsaber. "The reason we're here, uh…" He paused, realizing he didn't know the soldier's name. The object of his attention quickly supplied it, in quick, precise military fashion.

"Christian." He said, backing down slightly. Anakin thought for a moment he was going to stand down, but "Christian" was only getting a better angle on his head with his slugthrower.

"Master Chief Petty Officer. SPARTAN-122." He added.

"Well, Christian," Anakin began again. "We unintentionally entered your space following this ship."

"Who's we?" Christian probed. Anakin paused.

"My battle group."

"How many ships?" Christian spat. Anakin decided he didn't really like how this was going. He paused again, reaching into the Force as he did so.

"You don't need to know anything more." He said, waving his hand in the motion of the famous Jedi Mind Trick. Christian didn't react.

"Uh, yeah, I do." He replied, sounding a little surprised. Anakin blinked.

Had he just shrugged off a Mind Trick?

Anakin pressed further, searching through the Force for any weakness, any reason behind the resistance, and in doing so received another shock;

He couldn't feel the soldier.

There was no Force signature at all. At least none that was discernible.

His shock must have been visible on his face as the soldier tilted his armor-encased head.

"What the fuck you staring at, freak?" He asked, raising his gun slightly. Anakin was about to answer when he did sense something. Several somethings. Coming from behind.

"Sir, clankers inbound!" Rex bellowed. "Rollies and stick tinnies!"

"Blast it!" Anakin swore. He spun around, igniting his lightsaber as he did so. There was a cry, and a clatter of armor plate on deck. Apparently, Anakin's movement had unbalanced Christian. He ignored it and instead focused on the approaching droid forces. They were approaching in standard formation, the so-called "rollies" (better known as destroyer droids or droidekas) leading the charge in wheel form with the slower "stick tinnies" (B1 battle droids) followed behind.

"Oh great," One of Christian's female teammates muttered. "More metal motherfuckers."

The droids arranged themselves into a fire line before Anakin and his troops, droidekas deploying into combat mode and the battle droids aiming their blasters over their shields.

The Republic troops faced them, but something nagged at Anakin. Something about this situation wasn't right.

"I've got a bad feeling about this…" Ahsoka said from next to him. Anakin nodded in agreement. Both Jedi readied their lightsabers to deflect any bolts from the droids back at them.

But no shots came. The clones and Jedi stood, confused, waiting.

"Uh…I think they're busted, Master." Ahsoka said hesitantly. She lowered her lightsaber slightly. The droid's didn't react, with the exception of one, which simply fell over, stiff as a board.

"Copy that, sir." Rex added. He and the rest of the clones lowered their weapons. Anakin let out a small sigh of relief.

"Well, not that that's taken care of..." He paused and turned back to look at Christian and his group. They, however, weren't looking at him. All six of them were in motion, sweeping the area with their separate weapons.

"Okay, now this is weird." Jessie said. One of the soldiers stopped and held up a single finger to him; the universal "shut-the-hell-up" signal.

"Can't you hear it?" He said. Anakin and the clones looked at him in confusion, but Ahsoka paused.

"Yeah, I hear it." She said, voice dropping in fear or exhilaration. "The clankers aren't done with us yet."

Seconds later, the rest of the group heard it to. Something like a cross between high-power hydraulic motors and metallic clicking.

"There!" Fives yelled, pointing to the other side of the bridge. Everyone turned, the other group aiming their weapons at the spot. Standing near the farthest-starboard viewport was a BX-class commando droid. It stared at the Republic soldiers for a moment, then grabbed what looked like a switch on the wall next to it.

"Time to die, Republic dogs." It said, in a deep, resonating voice. Anakin started to draw in a breath to make a retort when the deckplates of the bridge suddenly folded out to the sides.

Anakin had enough time to change his retort to a curse before he, Ahsoka, the clones, the droids, and four of the other soldiers fell down into the darkness below.

* * *

"Christian!" Hester screamed. The Spartan-IV watched in horror as her boss fell into the suddenly open pit with a cry of shock, followed by Echo, Matt, Kelly, and everyone else on the platform. She threw her hand out to him, grabbing the command chair to stop herself from plummeting along with him when she grabbed him, but he was too far away. In seconds, Christian's luminescent-green armor disappeared. Hester felt shock, but shook it off. In its place rushed anger. She turned towards the skinny black robot that had pulled the lever. Hester grabbed both her pistols and aimed them at the robot, but Coraline beat her to it.

"You fucking walking talking tin-can freak!" She bellowed. Hester watched in surprise as Coraline literally threw herself at the robot, assault rifle discarded, crowbar at the ready. The robot started to pull something off its back, but Coraline brought the crowbar down with crushing force. The arm sheered off in a burst of sparks. The robot looked at in surprise. Coraline laughed, a small, cough-like sound.

"See you in hell, bastard." She said. With a roar, she put the crowbar through the short, black head of the robot with enough force to rip the top part of the torso out with it. And she didn't stop there. Within thirty seconds, she completely dismantled the skeletal offender, and continued to beat its remains even after it was busted and was apparently intending to shove them down the hole in the center of the bridge until Hester came up to her and grasped her shoulder. She stopped.

"On your feet." Ordered Hester. "We have a job to do."

"What job?" Coraline said, standing and depolarizing her faceplate so Hester could see her glare. "There's only two of us left!"

"The perfect number to find the other four." Said Hester. Coraline's glare turned into a smile.

"Well, there's actually three of us," She said. She turned to the holotank. "Penny?" She called.

With a shimmer of holographic dust, the AI's avatar appeared once more.

"I'm here." She replied. The peppy, upbeat attitude was gone, replaced by what could be considered shock. If AI's were susceptible to shock. Even her avatar was affected. Instead of being brilliantly red, it was more of a rusty metal shade. Hester noticed this.

"What's wrong?" She asked. Penny pushed her holographic hair out of her eyes.

"Nothing. Just surprised." She smiled, shakily, but her avatar brightened. "Couldn't do anything about that trap door."

"Really? That's a first." Coraline said.

"Wait, you couldn't find some way to stop it?" Asked Hester. Penny shook her head.

"There's nothing to find." She replied. "The only way to access that door is through the handle that droid pulled."

"Droid?" Both female Spartan's asked simultaneously.

"The robots you've been running into. Apparently, they're called droids. No idea why."

"You dig that out of the computer?" Queried Hester.

"One of the first things I found." Penny smiled.

"How far are you into the system?" Coraline asked.

"You mean can I track our lost teammates? Yes. Hold on." Penny placed her hand to her forehead again. A three-dimensional map of the ship came into being next to her. Four dots were moving down towards the lower levels.

"Where are they going?" Hester asked.

"Not sure, but it's not an airlock, reactor, or anything else dangerous." Penny waved her hand, and the bridge door opened. "I'll lead you to where they'll end up. Any door you need to go through will be open."

"Nice." Coraline smiled broadly and grabbed her MA5D before heading out of the door, skirting the large hole in the deck as she did so. Hester checked her pistols and made to follow. Before she left, she turned to Penny and saluted her.

"Nicely done." She said. Penny returned the salute.

"Hey, Christian's my friend too." She shrugged. "There's no way in hell I'm gonna let him down."

"That's what I'm counting on." Hester sprinted out of the bridge after Coraline.

* * *

To her credit, Ahsoka didn't scream on the way down. But there were clones under her command falling with her, and one of the things she had learned from Anakin was never show fear in front of your men.

Seconds after the commando droid pulled the lever and sent her plummeting into darkness, however, something in the tunnel they were falling through shifted, shoving everyone away from Ahsoka. Once she realized she was alone, she began to howl uncontrollably. Unfortunately, the sudden expulsion of air from her lungs sent her spinning head over heels.

Which was how she realized she wasn't actually alone.

As she rotated, she saw something glinting above her. She reached out with the Force to steady herself and focus on it. The object came closer. As it did so, Ahsoka realized it was the face plate of one of the soldiers from the bridge. She wondered why it was glinting in such a dark place.

Then she saw the strange lightsaber the soldier was clutching in their left hand.

Ahsoka didn't have time to more than glance at it before she felt the ground approaching. Using the Force again, she slowed herself down enough to keep her legs in one piece when she landed. Impacting the deck made her feet sting, but it was better than broken legs.

Ahsoka stood up and shook out her feet, cursing and hobbling as she did so. While she was hopping around, something prickled through her conscious. Not the Force, but the hard-wired special awareness all Togruta's had received from their predatory ancestors. She stopped, letting her body relax and "see" the world around her through the echolocation-like sense provided by her montrails and head-tails. It was hard to describe how her brain perceived this, but it did.

And it showed her she wasn't alone again. Whomever had been falling just above her was still falling.

Ahsoka opened her eyes and jumped to the side. Just in time. The soldier shot out of the tube at terminal velocity, missed Ahsoka's left head-tail by a couple centimeters, and slammed into the deck hard enough to put a full meter dent in it. The outside of the armor the soldier wore glowed for a second, as if wrapped in energy, but it faded quickly. The soldier paused, and Ahsoka took the time to look over it.

The armor it wore was a greenish color, which seemed to glow from the inside. Small indents near the joints were actually glowing. On the right shoulder was the number 419.

The helmet's front was taken up by a large gold-tinted faceplate that looked like it was made of transperisteel. Slung across the soldier's back was some kind of large-barreled slugthrower.

Ahsoka inched forward, trying to get a better look. 419 took that moment to raise his or her head. The two beings locked eyes (or eyes and faceplate), and Ahsoka jerked back, partially in surprise, partially from the sudden surge of hate she sensed through the Force, and the angry female voice that rang through her mind.

_Get out of my face, you fucking alien freak!_

"Look who's talking." Ahsoka responded without thinking. 419 answered by launching herself (Ahsoka decided whoever was under the armor was female, from the voice) forward, lightsaber swinging out towards the Togruta's face. Time slowed for Ahsoka as both her natural reflexes and her Force sensitivity kicked in. She could see the energy coursing through the girl's lightsaber as it came towards her. Now that she had the time, she could see it was actually two blades, wider at the hilt than the tip. These blades emerged from the handle, curved out, and tapered to two fine points. Both of which were now approaching Ahsoka's face. The Padawan decided it would be best to move. So she did.

Time returned to normal. 419 hurled through the air where Ahsoka had been a second ago, turned her leap into a roll, and came up facing Ahsoka again, lightsaber held out to the side. Ahsoka responded by activating her own. The armored soldier cocked her helmeted head.

_So these guys have Energy Swords._ Ahsoka heard in her mind. _Good. I can always use more trophies. Maybe I could give this one to Christian? I bet he'd like it._

"You want this?" Ahsoka said, tossing her lightsaber from hand to hand. "Come and get it."

_Don't mind if I- Wait, you can hear me?_ The voice sounded surprised. Very surprised.

"Uh, yeah?" Said Ahsoka. "Kind of hard not to when your broadcasting your thoughts like you are."

_You're reading my thoughts?_

"Yes." Ahsoka said patiently. "Now that we figured that out, perhaps we can talk-"

_No, now I have another reason to kill beside your Energy Sword YOU TELEPATHIC INHUMAN WHORE! _

419 rose to her feet and, with a yell that echoed through Ahsoka's mind, charged Energy Sword held straight out to the side. Ahsoka sidestepped, and 419 turned with her. There was a sizzling sound as Energy Sword and lightsaber connected. Sparks flew, and 419's armor shimmered again. Ahsoka jerked back as she felt her skin crawl.

She pushed herself back with the Force, and swung a wide swipe at 419. The girl ducked, but Ahsoka's lightsaber caught the edge of her shoulder. But instead of going through, it bounced off, and the armor glowed again. 419 didn't even slow down. Ahsoka tried again, this time for the leg. Her lightsaber bounced off that too.

The armor had an energy shield, Ahsoka realized. This was going to be tougher than she thought.

Both combatants jumped back, leaving a two meter empty space between them.

_Not bad. You're faster than those Bravo Kilos. I'm impressed. _ 419 rose and looked at Ahsoka. _Let's see what else you've got._

"Be my guest." Ahsoka breathed. 419 nodded, a slight tic of the head, then charged again.

Ahsoka rushed to meet her.

* * *

Christian was tumbling down through darkness, spinning head over heels. Despite this, he was calm.

The darkness didn't bother him. One of the upgrades the UNSC had put into the Spartan-IV's armor was a VISR, similar to the one used by ODST's. Combined with their enhanced natural night vision, Christian and his fellow Spartan's could basically see better in the dark than in the light.

The falling wasn't a problem either. His armor's gel layer could take the force of whatever he hit. The new, upgraded MK VI/B armor was at least the equal of the MK VI, if not better in most ways, and had not 117 survived a two kilometer fall, through the atmosphere, none the less, wearing the MK VI just before the Second Battle of Earth? And even if it looked like he wouldn't survive the fall, he could always latch onto the wall with his magnetic gloves.

Even the fact that Echo had been separated from the group didn't worry him. He knew Echo could take care of herself. If anything, he would be worried about the alien girl who fell with her. Echo had always had a xenophobia problem, and Christian felt his scalp crawl as he thought about what she would do to the girl if she had the chance.

And the statistical fact that the first people to meet a new enemy usually died? Well, those were normal people. Christian was a Spartan.

And Spartan's never died.

And so, as Christian plummeted into the bowels of the ship, the only thoughts that ran through his head were whether or not Penny had safely gotten back to the _Kelly_ and if he should save his last couple Battle Rifle clips or use them up and risk it grabbing one of the white armored soldiers guns. He found both lines of thought enjoyable, and he felt his face turn up in a smile under his helmet.

His mood was broken by a sudden feminine scream from above. He looked up to see Kelly plummeting towards him, arms pin wheeling, rifle striking sparks when it hit the walls. She was apparently taking this worse than he was. And he needed his team as calm as he was. Christian reached his hand out, and, as Kelly shot past him, grabbed the barrel of her SRS99E-S2 AMSO. Kelly jerked, slowing down so that she and Christian were falling at the same rate. The sniper exhaled explosively.

"Thanks. Kinda lost it there." Kelly laughed nervously.

"Obviously." Christian deadpanned. Kelly looked down deeper into the shaft.

"You think it might be a good idea to stop?" She asked. Christian stared at her.

"Why? We could survive a fall three times this height."

"Actually, I was more interested in getting the drop on our new 'friends'."

"Good point." Christian conceded. It was a tactically viable plan. With one hand still holding Kelly, he reached out and pressed his hand to the wall. The magnetic plates in his palms, designed for zero-G work and combat, grabbed hold with a jolt. Christian grunted, and thought for a moment his arm was going to get wrenched out of its socket. But it stayed. The two Spartan's swung for a moment, before Christian steadied himself with the plates in his boots. Kelly added her own plates for additional stability. Behind them, the white armored soldiers and their black-clad leader fell past them. Kelly, always one to taunt the enemy, raised her hand in a mock salute to the falling soldiers. Seconds later, something green joined them.

"Uh, I think that was Matt." Christian noted.

"Got him." Kelly reached out and grabbed Matt by the ankle as the Spartan hurtled past. The sudden loss of momentum caused Matt to slam face-first into the shaft's wall, leaving a helmet-shaped dent in it.

"Ow." He said.

"Sorry." Kelly said. Christian imagined her doing the stereotypical "sorry cringe" (grimace, clenched fists, inhaled through clenched teeth) under her helmet.

"I'll live." Replied Matt. The hanging Spartan swung his arms forward, then back. His whole body moved with him, and after a couple repeats of this movement he was able to magnetize himself to the wall. From there he climbed up so that Kelly could let go of him. All three Spartans paused, catching their breath. Christian's COM chimed. He activated it.

"Christian, you there?" Penny's voice filtered through Christian's helmet speakers.

"Penny!" Christian answered in surprise. "I'm here, and alright. For now. Did you get through to the _Kelly_?"

"Negative." The AI replied. "They're in COM lockdown right now. I'm stuck here, for the moment. But I did get to the _Arthur_, at least on a communications level."

"And?" Probed Christian.

"I've told them what's going on. They're prepping an exfil Pelican as we speak. The pilot says she's ready when you are."

"Good. And Beta Team?"

"No luck." Penny sighed. "They've been assigned with anti-boarding detail for the listening post."

"Fuck." Christian placed his head to the metal wall he held onto. "Anything else I should know about?"

"Yes." Penny's voice brightened. "Hester and Coraline didn't fall with you. They're currently inbound to your position."

"Can you see where we are?" Christian looked down into the blackness below him.

"Affirmative. The shaft you're in is only about a dozen meters longer. Shouldn't be too hard to make that, should it?"

"Damn straight. Tell Hester we'll meet them at the bottom."

"Yes sir."

"And Penny?"

"Yes, Christian?"

"The moment your done stripping this ship clean of data, upload it to everyone's armor, even if you manage to send it via COM. I want to make sure we get it, no matter the cost."

"Way ahead of you." Penny sounded smug. "I compressed and uploaded everything five minutes ago."

"Good. Keep me posted. Over and out."

"You got it, Chris." Penny terminated the connection. Christian turned his COM off and sighed. He really hated when Penny used his nickname. He hadn't gone by it since before boot camp. He looked down at his teammates.

"Let's fly." He said simply. The two nodded, and simultaneously released themselves from the wall.

Darkness once again engulfed them.

* * *

"Come on, shake a leg!" Hester called over her shoulder. About a meter behind her, Coraline sprinted to catch up. The two Spartans had been running through the seemingly non-stop hallways of the ship. They hadn't run into any more droids, but the sheer size of the ship had slowed them down.

"Kinda hard to run and listen to the radio at the same time." Coraline replied, holding her hand to her helmet's external COM control. Hester slowed as she looked over her shoulder at her teammate.

"Who's talking?" She asked.

"Penny." Coraline tapped her COM, shutting it off. "She's made contact with Christian. They're gonna meet at the bottom of the shaft they fell into."

"Where's it go to?"

"Hanger. And it sounds like the _Arthur_ is prepping us a ride out of here." Coraline glanced over her MA5D, checking for any problems caused by her mad sprinting, though there probably weren't going to be, considering the MA5 series's long history of ruggedness, one that would put the 21st century era AK-47 to shame.

"Well that's lucky. We can regroup and get the hell out of here." Hester stopped walking. In the corner of her HUD, she noticed something yellow flash in her Motion Tracker.

A friendly contact. Heading towards them. And behind it, a red one.

"You seeing this?" Coraline asked in surprise. Apparently, she'd noticed it too.

"Yeah. Who is it?" Hester turned, putting the dot into the white triangle on the Tracker's display that represented her field of vision. She found herself facing a closed door.

"Checking…" Muttered Coraline. A moment later, a number popped up near the dot. 419.

Echo.

Hester placed her helmet to the door. From the other side, amplified by her augmented ears and the sensors in her helmet, she could hear the clang of metal on metal, shouts, and a humming noise, like the Energy Swords she'd seen used on the bridge.

On her Motion Tracker, the two dots converged on her position. The noises on the other side stopped. Hester stopped breathing, straining to hear anything. Silence filled her head.

Without warning, the twin plasma blades of an Energy Sword erupted from the door centimeters from Hester's faceplate.

"Fuck!" She roared, jerking back from the door instinctively. The blades withdrew, leaving two small glowing holes, only to reappear from a lower section. They jerked up violently, cutting a long slash in the metal of the door, and then disappeared again. Hester was left looking dumbly at the door. Coraline came and stood next to her.

"Well, that wasn't strange in any way." She concluded, staring at the door.

"No shit." Hester cautiously leaned in closer to the holes and slashes, still glowing from the heat of their creation.

She had all of fifteen seconds to observe them before, with a groan of stressed metal, a section of the door bulged out. Hester backed away again, pistol drawn. Another part of the door, about the size of a human fist, bent out, and then another. It sounded to Hester as if someone was trying to punch though the metal.

Another, much larger section deformed, and with a shriek and a burst of sparks the door finally failed, sailing outward in a cloud of debris.

Both Spartans had seen it coming, and threw themselves out of its way in opposite directions. As they did, time slowed as they entered Spartan Time, allowing them a front-row seat to the destruction of the door, as well as the rag-doll-like flight of the orange-skinned alien from the bridge that followed the remains of the door.

There was a loud _thunk_ as the Spartan's hit the deck and rolled, and time resumed its normal course for them. The alien girl crashed to the ground not far from them with a meaty _smack_, but regained her feet quickly and raised her head to look at the room beyond the destroyed door. Hester noticed the green Energy Sword she had wielded on the bridge was in her hand, glowing brightly.

From the billowing dust surrounding the doorframe came a sound; the tread of heavy armored boots. A glow appeared within, a bluish-white wedge in a grey background. It intensified, and solidified into the familiar shape of an Elite Energy Sword. Being held in a MJLONIR MK VI/B gauntlet.

With great finality, Echo stepped free of the dust cloud, Energy Sword clutched in her left hand. Her faceplate was depolarized, and Hester could see her teammate's cold green eyes staring at the crouching alien. She could practically taste the hatred Echo was feeling for her target.

In perfect synchronization, Hester and Coraline drew and aimed their weapons at the alien. They didn't know the exact specifics of this confrontation, but they didn't need to know. Echo was fighting her. That was good enough for them.

But apparently not good enough for Echo. As she stood there, the Spartan used her right hand to sign to her teammates.  
_Stand down. She's mine._

"You sure?" Coraline asked as she stood up. "She seems like a match for you."

_I can handle her. Go find the rest of the team._

"While you stay here and fight to the death?" Coraline laughed darkly, a one-note sound, more bark that anything else. "Yeah, right."

_You don't think I can take her?_ If hand movements could convey contempt, Echo's would be doing so. The girl's eyes narrowed under her helmet. Hester started to jump in, but the alien girl spoke from the floor.

"You haven't exactly impressed me." She said. All three Spartan's refocused their attention on her.

"So they can read hand signs too." Coraline noted. "Great."

_Worse. She can read _minds.

Hester and Coraline whirled on Echo.

"She can read minds?" They said simultaneously.

"Why is everybody finding this so surprising?" The girl added, crossing her arms. "It's like you've never heard of a telepath before."

"Cocky words coming from a dead girl." said Hester. Coraline groaned, impatient.

"Look, could we speed this up?" she said. "I want to get the hell out of here."

"Well you can, if you tell your friend here to leave me alone!" The girl angrily burst out. Hester looked first at her, then Echo.

"Please tell me you didn't start this." she said, trying not to sound pleading.

_I didn't start this. _Echo shrugged as she finished. Her teammates exchanged looks.

"Oh bloody fucking hell." Coraline spat. "Can't you control your xenophobia until _after_ we know we aren't going to end up in another war with these guys?"

_Whatever. Besides, we could take them._

"Like hell we could! We're still getting back on our damn feet from the Covies! We don't want another war."

"Then we have another thing in common." Said the girl. She rose, causing the three Spartans to follow her with their weapons. "We don't want to be fighting another war either."

"So you won't take offense to the fact that our _teammate_" (Coraline elbowed Echo's chestplate as she said this) "Attacked you?"

"Sure. Felt good to fight someone closer to my level of skill again." The girl smiled, showing a mouthful of pointy teeth and making the Spartans step back slightly.

"Um, good. Glad to hear it." Hester muttered. She looked over her weapons, the Spartan equivalent of a head scratch. The silence was broken by the activation of Coraline's COM. Seconds later, she shut it off. Hester noticed a subtle shift in her body language, from calm to anxious.

"That was Penny. Something just dropped into real space. Some kind of ship."

"Friendly?" Hester queried.

"Not sure. Doesn't match anything on our side."

_How big?_ Echo signed, putting her Energy Sword away as she did so.

"Not huge. About the size of a Longsword."

"Like that ship Beta Team detected earlier."

"About that size. But different shape. Here." She raised her gauntleted hand, and a hologram sprang to life on it. A rotating representation of a ship appeared. It was bizarre in shape, even more so than the ship they were currently on. A ball-shaped front end with a long fan-like structure spread vertically behind it. What were obviously guns perched on the top and bottom of this wing.

"Oh Sith." The alien girl muttered, face turning to worry. "That's a _Ginivex_-class ship. She's on her way."

"Wait, who, what?" Hester gasped. "Could I get some clarification here?"

"No time." The girl turned and started to jog down the hallway they were in. Coraline reached out and grabbed her by the arm, fingers locking like a magnetic clamp over the reddish flesh.

"Start making sense. Now." She ordered. The girl glared at her.

"If we don't move now, my Master and your teammates are going to be in trouble. How's that for detail?"

"How much trouble?"

"Sent through an airlock in the nude level trouble."

"Then lead the way." Coraline let go of the girls arm, and she continued down the hallway.

"Wait, uh…" Hester started, before realizing she didn't know the girls name.

"Ahsoka Tano." The girl said, smiling again.

"Did you say _Master_?" Hester felt surprised.

"Yeah. He's my teacher, I'm his student. That sort of thing."

"Oh." Hester shrugged.

"I didn't catch your names, did I?" Ahsoka realized. Hester looked at the other two Spartans, who shook their heads.

"Guess not. I'm Hester, she's Coraline, and the one you've been fighting is Echo. SPARTANS-027, -011, and -419. "

"Please to meet you all. And as much as I'd like to ask what a Spartan is, we don't have time. Let's go." Ahsoka said quickly, before continuing on. The three Spartans watched her go, before moving closer together.

_You're actually trusting her?_ Singed Echo, using both hands now.

"For now." Coraline muttered. "She can lead us to Christian, Matt and Kelly."

"Echo has a point though." Hester added. "We don't know much about her. And she's, well…"

_A xeno?_

"Yeah."

"Don't worry." Coraline rapped Hester's helmet. "If she tries something, we'll let Echo have her again."

"Works for me." Hester said. The three bumped fists in a complex, circular pattern (Echo to Coraline, Coraline to Hester, Hester to Echo), readied their weapons, and followed Ahsoka down the hall.


	6. Common Enemy

**A/N: Well, I can now say this story has exceeded every one of my expectations for it. When I first started writing this, I had guessed it would get some people interested, but not that many. Similar to my other stories, with their small but dedicated fan bases. However, I can officially say that this story now has more hits, reviews, faves and alerts for it than **_**all my other stories combined**_**. How many hits, you may ask?**

_**OVER 9000!**_

**Yeah, sorry about that. Couldn't resist. But it's true (last time I checked, I had 11,000+ hits for all chapters). Anyway, I have some thanks to give;**

**Dusel, for reviewing every single one of my chapters, and providing a good, clear idea of my early progress,**

**SpartanCommander, for providing interesting alternate ideas on how to continue the story, most of which are possible, as well as having such vast knowledge on the two universes (including the small things that only the truest of fans would notice),**

**SpaceCowboy2013, for knowing so much about Halo and pointing out inconsistencies in my thought processes and technical descriptions, and possible UNSC/Republic relations ideas,**

**And finally, grey280 (formerly Avatarfanatic280), for providing grammar and spelling corrections (for this and most of my other stories), and providing me with someone to bounce ideas off of. **

**Additionally: I've been asked several times wither or not the Master Chief will make an appearance in this story and/or where he is currently. The answer to those questions are; **

**Yes (this fic does, after all, have Halo parts in it. It just wouldn't be right not to have him here) and;**

**The back half of **_**Forward Until Dawn**_**. To all of you thinking "**_**wait, they haven't rescued him yet?**_**", remember, in the actual canon universe, it takes them at least 50 years to find him (if not more). Watch the Believe trailers for Halo 3. One of them mentions that the day that humanity almost went extinct (A.K.A Halo 3) was "half a century ago" (ergo, 50 years). Another one mentions that 43 years pass between the Second Battle of Earth (Halo 3) and the time the add happens. So it's going to take a while for them to find him in the real universe. If it will take them that long in this one...well, just keep reading. You'll find out. **

**Finally; I have recently acquired several more sources of information regarding the two universes, including the Halo Encyclopedia. In response, I have made several minor changes to the chapters before this one (Example: The Spartan-class ships are now Supercrusiers, as opposed to the Heavy Carriers I had them as before). Not supremely important, but those who like to be up to date might want to look over the previous chapters. **

**Thanks to all, and hope you like this next chapter!**

**Cmd. Gen. Marasco, Out.**

**Chapter 5**

**Common Enemy**

Unlike the rest of it's many, twisting hallways, the main external hanger of the frigate was relatively silent and devoid of life. Occasionally, some random broken wire would flare to brilliance, but only for a second or so. Then silence would return.

That resounding silence was suddenly, violently, and permanently removed as, with a groan of metal on metal, a rectangular hole in the ceiling opened and spewed out three green-armored shapes.

Christian, Kelly and Matt all saw the hole open, and prepared to put their boots on solid ground again.

Christian tucked himself into a ball, spinning slightly as not to hit wrong. At the last second, he exploded from his curled form and crashed to the deck. He sprung forward and out, performing a series of rolls and tucks followed by a landing an Olympic Games open-floor gymnast would have been proud of, had the Olympics not been effectively forgotten and abandoned sometime during the Interplanetary War.

Kelly's landing was less spectacular, but just as effective. She, too, curled into a ball, but instead of jumping out as Christian had, she stayed curled up when she hit and used her momentum to roll herself into the cover of a crate.

Matt's arrival wasn't as graceful as the first two's. His intent had been to do a roll like Kelly. But during his final fall to the ground, the small section of his brain that controlled fear sparked to life. Before his augmentations, Matt had been afraid of heights. His training as a SPARTAN and the drug cocktail given to him during his augmentations had forced this irrational fear far into his primitive brain, but not completely eliminated it. And now, a tiny spark of it ignited. Not enough to be a serious problem, or even be noticed by his conscious mind, but enough to cause him to break his tucked knees slightly. Instead of rolling away when he hit, he slammed into the hanger deck with the force of a meteor. The deck buckled violently, and Matt's shields sparked from it. For a moment, he lay on the deck, stunned. Then he hoisted himself to his knees and groaned.

"Ow. Why does that always happen?" He asked, more to himself than to his teammates.

"Who knows? On your feet." Christian ordered. Matt stood with a grunt. The three Spartans looked around.

The hanger was a quite as it had been before they had crashed into it. With no danger in sight, the soldiers holstered their weapons. Christian activated his COM, signaling the other Spartans, something that had slipped his mind since (and possible because of) the fall. The call managed to get through.

"Hester, you there?"

"I'm here. So's the rest of the group." The electronics expert replied. "Glad to finally hear from you."

"Same." Christian smiled under his helmet. Though he'd never admit it, he'd been worried about his team. "Give me a SIT REP."

"All personnel intact. Bit low on ammo, but not dire. Armor's still vacuum-sealed as well."

"Good. Any sign of Echo?"

"She's here. She says hi."

Christian smiled again. He'd figured Echo would be fine. "Tell her I say hi back. Any sign of that xeno girl that she fell after?"

"She's here, too. Looks like we're on the same side, sir."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I know. But we have more pressing problems. According to Ahsoka-"

"Who?"

"The girl. Her name's Ahsoka Tano."

"I see. Continue."

"Well, there's a ship incoming to our position. It's small, but according to Ahsoka, whoever's on that ship is bad news." Hester paused, and Christian heard muttering in the back ground. "Don't know the details, but she looks freaked, sir."

"Then we should be worried too." Christian declared. "Where are you?"

"Three dozen meters from your position and running hard. You want to meet up?"

"Fucking straight. Get here as soon as you can."

"Sir, yes sir." Hester cut the COM. Christian turned to Kelly and Matt.

"Set up positions. We're going to have to hold out till the rest of the team gets here."

"Great." Grumbled Matt. "Just when I thought we were going to get a break."

"You got a problem with more fighting?" Christian raised an eyebrow under his helmet. Usually, Matt was one of the first Spartans to throw into the fray.

"I do when I'm almost out of ammo." Matt held up his remaining magazines. Two and a half, Christian could see, and no grenades. Not good.

"I'm almost dry too." Kelly added.

"Shit." Christian spat. "Alright, rescind that. We need to rearm first."

"And how the hell are we supposed to do that?" Matt asked acidly. Christian's eyes traveled over the many boxes and containers in the hanger around them. Nothing looked promising except. Then he noticed one of them had broken open sometime in the past. Spilling out of it were dozens of the strange guns the Spartans had seen earlier. Mixed in were quite a few small black boxes. Christian sprinted over and grabbed one of the guns. It was smaller than his Battle Rifle, but larger than Matt's SMG. It reminded him of an MA2B or MA5K, the cut-down and carbine versions of the MA5 assault rifle, as it seemed designed for destruction, not attractiveness. The design was simple; barrel in the front, uncovered workings in the middle, grip and trigger at the back. There wasn't a stock, just like on an MA5 series. On the left side, just above the grip, was a rectangular hole that looked like it was built to accept the black boxes littering the floor. Probably the robot's equivalent of a magazine. Hesitating for only a moment, Christian slapped one of the boxy mags into the receiver. The gun seemed to hum in his hands. Christian held it gingerly, ready to throw it away if something bad happened, but it stayed in one piece and didn't show any signs of blowing up. Christian brought it up to his helmet, looking for iron sites of any kind. There were none. He shrugged. As soon as he let it, his armor would link with the gun and provide a cross-hair on his HUD. He rose from his crouch, checking for anything like a safety. Again, there was none. Hesitating again, Christian test-fired the gun into the hanger wall. It spat a trio of red beams, which blew good-sized burning holes in the wall he aimed at. It was fully obviously fully automatic, and there was almost no recoil, he noticed. He fired again, steadying himself against the gun as if it were an Assault Rifle. This time, the shots hit the exact same area, each enlarging the hole several centimeters. Christian smiled under his helmet. He switched hands and fired the gun one-handed. Again, it blew chunks out of the wall, almost as accurate as when he'd been holding it in both hands. It would obviously serve his team adequately.

He dropped his tested weapon and grabbed four more guns, two in each hand, and turned to his team.

"Looks like our ammo problems solved." He said, holding up the rifles. "Sling what you got and load up. Dual wield. Take as many of these weird mags as you can." He tossed the rifles he was holding to his teammate's, who caught them easily. They both acknowledged his orders. Christian joined them, stuffing as many mags as he could into his ammo pouches. He could fit a lot of them in there. Ammo wasn't going to be a problem for a bit. When they finished, Kelly and Matt turned to Christian, awaiting orders.

"Set up." He said. The other Spartan's nodded, and did so, slipping behind boxes and other debris. Christian joined them.

"So, now what?" Matt asked, adjusting himself behind his cover.

"We wait." Christian started to say.

Then one of doors near them opened, and the Spartan's found themselves face to face with yet another seemingly endless line of robots.

"Well, so much for that." Kelly muttered as all three opened fire.

* * *

Black. That's what filled Anakin's mind. And pain. He couldn't see, and he hurt. That was his existence. Why did he hurt so much? He couldn't remember. Something about a hole, or a shaft, or-

Right. The trap door on the frigates bridge that commando droid activated. And falling. Had he hit the ground? Was he dead? No, being dead shouldn't hurt. He was still alive. Somehow.

With a groan, Anakin forced his eyes open, found the light hurt them, and closed them again. He tried to sit up. Found he couldn't. Something was holding him down.

"Captain, he's coming around!" A voice shouted. One of the clones. Probably the medic. Kix? Yes, that was his name. Anakin forced his eyes open again, coming face-to-helmet with the medic.

"You're going to be fine, sir." Kix said calmly. "Just a bump on the head. You've probably taken worse."

"I know he has." Added another voice. Anakin looked over Kix's personalized helmet to see Rex standing behind him, blaster pistol's held at his sides. "Feeling alright, sir?"

"Been better." Anakin replied, waving Jessie away. The medic retreated, letting Anakin get up. The Jedi rose, somewhat unsteadily, and brushed himself off. The pain faded quickly, aided by Anakin's connection to the Force. "How's the squad?"

"All fine. Echo and Fives are a little shaken, Waxer and Boil are threatening to tear this whole place apart with their bare hands, and Hardcase lost his rifle, but they'll all live. Thanks to you." Rex nodded in appreciation.

"Thanks to me?" Anakin couldn't remember doing anything to save the group. For that matter, he couldn't remember much after the plunge down the hole.

"You slowed our fall with the Force, sir." Kix pitched in. "You don't remember?"

"No, I don't." Anakin grumbled. He scowled.

"That's normal." Said Kix. "Humans don't usually remember the moment leading up to an impact like we avoided."

"Like that time in the Bothawui asteroid belt." Anakin said, stretching his limbs to see if he had any problems. "I remember my fighter getting hit by that chunk of debris, but not the explosion."

"Exactly, sir." Kix sounded impressed. Anakin shrugged and checked his belt. Everything was there-

Except his lightsaber.

"You might be needing this, General." Another clone had joined the conversation. Anakin turned to see Echo walking towards him, holding his missing weapon. It must have come lose from his belt from after they hit the floor. The clone trooper tossed it underhand, and Anakin caught it with a quick burst of the Force. The saber slammed into his palm with surprising force, much more than he had intended.

"That's weird." Anakin noted quietly. It wasn't the first time recently he'd noticed something strange regarding the Force. Since he'd left Republic space, his use of the Force had been...erratic. Like with those soldiers on the bridge. Their leader seemed to have shrugged off a Mind Trick. What had he introduced himself as? Christian, Something-Something SPARTAN-122. Yeah, that sounded right.

_But what the hell's a Spartan?_ Anakin thought to himself.

"Sir?" Asked Echo, having no knowledge of Anakin's internal conversation.

"Nothing." The Jedi replied. Looking for another subject, he noticed that the right side of Echo's chest plate still bore the blue hand print of Rishi eel blood he had received from Rex during the Battle of the Rishi Moon.

"I thought you cleaned that thing off a while ago." Anakin noted, indicating the mark. Echo jumped slightly, then relaxed.

"It's...sort of a memorial thing, sir." He replied slowly. "Honors the boys we lost on Rishi." He stopped for a moment, touched the Blaster Cannon on his shoulder, then continued. "I can clean it off, if you want."

"No need, just wondering. Besides, Domino deserves to be remembered." Anakin turned from Echo and reattached his lightsaber to it's place on his belt. "Any word from Ahsoka?"

"No, sir." Answered Rex. "We lost her in the shaft. I think some other passage opened up. One of those green guys fell with her, too."

"Great." Anakin sighed. "Guess we're going to have to find her."

"Copy that." Rex raised his pistols to shoulder hight in readiness. "Though on a ship this size, we could be looking for a while."

"Check the tracking beacon on her comlink." Echo suggested. Rex looked over at Anakin for confirmation. Anakin nodded, and Rex did so. Seconds later, he got a signal.

"Found her, sir." He reported. "She's heading for one of the hangers, from the looks of it." He pointed towards one of the doors surrounding them.

"Then let's catch up to her. Before she gets into trouble." Anakin walked in the direction Rex had indicated, but only got halfway before he stumbled and almost fell.

"Are you all right, General?" Kix asked. "Maybe we should get you checked out-"

"No." Anakin shrugged off the medic. "This wasn't anything from the fall. The Force is disturbed." He turned to his men, who raised their weapons to readiness.

"Get ready to fight. Ventress is coming." He said with certainty.

If the clones were shocked or worried by this statement, they didn't show it. The only response was a charging of weapons and Rex muttering "Good. Now I can repay that bald freak for Teth."

"Then lets not wait here, shall we?" Anakin asked. The clones shook their heads in unison, then followed their Jedi commander out the door.

* * *

Several thousand meters off the damaged side of the CIS frigate, space twisted once again to allow a ship to drop from faster-than-light travel to normal space. Like the most recent rips, it was a hyperspace jump, as opposed to a Slipspace rupture. The shape formed itself into a _Ginivex_-class fighter, more commonly known as a fanblade based on its shape, which consisted of a circular cockpit with a large solar sail strung out behind, attached to twin weapon/engine blocks.

Inside said cockpit, the Rattataki assassin and Sith disciple Asajj Ventress sat at the controls and fumed. Not as a part of any secret Sith battle preparation ritual or as a right rising from her species's warlike lifestyle, but for the simple reason that she didn't want to be were she was. Her place, she thought, was on the front lines, cutting down clones and Jedi with her blades and leading the armies of the Confederacy to victory. Instead, her master (if that was really the appropriate term for their relationship) Count Dooku had seen fit to send her to the literal middle of no-where as a _scout_, of all things.

Apparently, something had happened recently. Ventress wasn't exactly sure what, and Dooku hadn't shed much light on the subject, but she'd been able to make some educated guesses from what she'd heard. A small battle group of frigates had been sent to the back-water system of Bakura by the Separatist high command, and had run into a trio of Republic ships sent in response to the call for help the Bakurans sent out. Predictably, they had lost the ensuing battle. In a fair fight, droids usually lost to organic commanders. Unpredictably, one of the ships had made a run for safety into the Unknown Regions. Dooku had ordered a surprisingly good-sized fleet after it, for a reason unknown to Ventress. This was where the real trouble had started.

When the Separatist fleet had jumped after it's target, they had only a guess where it had gone to. Because of this, they were now effectively lost in space, with now way forward or back. Which was, once again, unsurprising.

The Unknown Regions bore their title for a reason. They were truly unknown, with few sections scouted and explored. The main reason being that there were very, very few safe, stable hyperspace routes through them, a lack caused by a galaxy-long string of hyperspace anomalies. One scientist had noted that it was "like a massive reef in space, preventing anything from getting in or out." The main conclusion regarding this strange "reef" was that it was impassible, and as such the Unknown Regions would probably stay unknown for the foreseeable future.

That conclusion, however, didn't take the Force into account.

Many times in recorded history (and probably even more before), beings with connections to the Force had been able use the omnipresent energy field to manipulate hyperspace in ways unimaginable to those not attuned to it, both intentionally (as in the few-years recent Outbound Flight Project, which had aimed at founding colonies in the Regions and hopefully reaching another galaxy and returning) and accidentally. The latter was devastatingly shown when, in debt-fueled desperation, hyperspace trailblazers Gav and Jori Daragon blindly jumped their ship _Starbreaker 12 _along a single unbroken route (dubbed the "Daragon Trail) that lead from the Koros (later Empress Teta) system in the Deep Core to the worlds of the long-forgotten Sith Empire (the tombworld Korriban, specifically), an event which sparked the Great Hyperspace War.

It was because of this technique that Asajj was now staring at the drifting hulk of the ship they had been sent after. She had been in her dwelling on Rattatak, enjoying a break from the war (even Sith needed downtime) when her Master had contacted her via hologram. Quickly, he had explained what he needed of her; she was to rendezvous with the fleet, and then, using her Force sensitivity, plot a safe, clear course to the lost frigate.

And so Ventress had. Now that she had found the lost ship and sent the data of her jump back to her allies, she had a secondary goal; see if the Republic had found the ship before she had. A quick scan showed that this was true. Ventress's scanners registered three of the Republic's Star Destroyers, floating several hundred kilometers away from the remains of the frigate.

But there were other ships on her screen...ones that didn't match anything in her computer's memory banks. Confused, Ventress looked out her cockpit into the inky blackness before her. Lit by the light of a large gas giant floated two of the strangest ships she had ever seen. They were blocky, linear, and tubular, and painted mostly a dark-green color.

Intrigued, both by the lack of data on the ships and by their presence, Ventress quickly scanned them using her ships advanced long range sensors. Readings spilled over her control screen. As they did, the Sith's eyes widened. The ships seemed to be incredibly primitive. Their hulls were made of some naturally-derived mineral (_titanium_, of all things, if her sensors were working correctly), their engines powered by a relatively simple form of nuclear fusion. And the weapons that her readings showed were apparently _ballistic_ in nature, missiles and giant-sized slugthrowers. Ventress pulled her face into her trademark smile. Primitives in space. The irony was delightful. For a moment, the Separatist commander played with the idea of attacking one of the ships, just to see how worthless their equipment really was. She shrugged it of just as quickly. After all, her Master would probably want to open diplomatic accords with these people, to see if they might be of some use-

Ventress never finished her thought. With a suddenness inconceivable to the humanoid mind, a massive wave of raw Force energy slammed into Ventress. It passed as quickly as it came, leaving her sweating and shaking worse than the times she had been hit with Sith Lightning. With this Force burst came something else; a single thought that, as Ventress examined it, was so clear and obvious that it must have come from the Force itself.

_These people will never be allies,_ the thought said. _They will only lead to the destruction of everything that we know. _

Ventress shook her head, freeing her mind of her confusion. She still didn't understand how she had received this premonition, but she wasn't going to doubt it. Her path now was clear; if these primitives were not going to ever be allies, then it was better to destroy them now while she had the chance than to have them possible ally with the Republic.

Once again, Ventress smiled. Though she was quite obviously outnumbered, she had faced such odds before and survived, even dominated. She could take them on easily.

Laughing out loud in excitement, Ventress shoved the throttles forward and soared towards her target.

* * *

Unknown to Ventress, several beings witnessed her arrival, deliberation, and acceleration, sealed behind the heavily reinforced windows of the Supercrusier UNSC _Kelly_'s bridge.

The bridge was dark, as all non-essential power had been diverted to weapon and defense systems. Even Juliet's holotank was powered down. The only light came from the systems star, reflected via the gas giant. This light formed a small pool of brilliance on the right arm of the command seat, situated in the very center of the bridge.

"Contact Alpha is accelerating." A voice spoke from the gloom. Male, slightly edgy, from the Targeting station on the right side of the bridge. "500,000 klicks and closing."

"MAC's are at 93 percent charge and rising at oh-point-eight per second. Missile systems are hot, hard lock for all. Pulse lasers and Helix II point-defense systems are operational. All single ships in contact and awaiting orders." Another voice joined the first, calmer and female, this time from the weapons station on the left. "Should we engage the contact?"

"No." A third voice, female like the last, but cold as the space surrounding the Spartan-class ship. It emanated from the command seat. The single patch of light on the bridge fell upon the right arm of the voice's owner as she leaned forward. The sleeve of a UNSC Navy-standard uniform, light blue and lightly-armored, a change implemented after the end of the Human-Covenant War. "But ready the PDS and Crossbow missiles, and tell the fighters to prepare for a dogfight. Lets see where this ship goes."

"Ma'am, are you sure that's a good idea?" The first female voice asked. It sounded surprised. "After all, there really isn't much-"

The voice was cut of as the visible portion of the arm made a quieting motion.

"We don't know anything about this person." The arm's owner explained. "They may not be after us. We don't want to make an enemy if we don't have one."

"Understood, ma'am. And if they are after us?"

"Then we retain the element of surprise till we need it. And we destroy them."

"A good plan, ma'am." The first male voice joined in. "But don't you think that's a little risky? We're a little exposed here..."

"Risk?" The cold female voice laughed, an almost inhuman noise. Shuffling noises filled the bridge in response. The laugh was making the officers present uncomfortable. The owner leaned forward into the light, revealing more of her anatomy. More armored uniform, the pins of a Captain in the UNSC Navy, a corner of a mouth curled into a cold grin, and a tag bearing a last name;

Keyes.

"Do you think," The still-living, now Captain Miranda Keyes whispered to her Targeting officer, "That after what I've been through, I'm worried about risk?"

"No, ma'am." The Targeting officer replied, swallowing hard.

"Good." Captain Keyes leaned back in her seat. "Now get it done."

"Aye." The two officers jumped to work, quickly following orders. Keyes looked out the window at the rapidly approaching ship.

"Come on, let's see what your planning..." She whispered.

She didn't have long to wait.

* * *

Howling an ancient Rattataki war cry, Ventress shoved her fighters engines to their limits. Her craft spun on it's axis and sped towards the ships. Ventress scanned her sensors, looking for her first target. Her targeting software picked something up; a fighter, it looked like. One of many soaring through the void. At least, Ventress guessed it was a fighter. It was huge for a single-ship, at least 60 meters long and 75 wide. It was all black, and was incredibly slow compared to her ship. It would do well as a target, Ventress decided. She locked onto the ship and slid into position behind it, steadying herself for a killing shot. Unfortunately, the ship was more advanced than she had guessed; the moment she locked on, the fighter started jinking and juking, trying to throw her lock. It must have some form of lock on warning system, she decided. And while the ship was massive, it seemed to be amazingly maneuverable. Ventress stuck on it's tail, but with more trouble than when she was fighting Republic ships. The pilot of this ship knew what he was doing. But no matter what level of skill, the pilot didn't have a connection to the Force. Within seconds, the lock reestablished itself. Ventress laughed again, and reached down to press the firing studs on her trigger.

As she did, her fighter was rocked by a series of sever impacts. Her lock disappeared, and her shield indicator dropped. Ventress looked at her instruments in fury, looking to see if another ship had snuck up behind her. None had. And yet, her ship still rocked.

A thought struck Ventress. She looked over at her shield indicator again. It revealed that it was her _front_ shield that was taking hits. The assassin raised her eyes from her readouts to look at her target. Streams of light seemed to be coming from ports on it's back.

No, not ports, Ventress realized. _Guns_. The ship she was attacking had ventral weapons systems. Ballistic weapons, admittedly, but still weapons.

Ventress grit her teeth in frustration, but calmed quickly. Though she'd have to be careful when attacking, she could still destroy the craft. After all, bullets weren't going to do that much damage to her ship.

As if her prey had heard her, a new sound filled her cockpit; the shriek of a missile lock-on.

Not only did her prey have guns on it's back, it had _missile systems_ as well.

For a moment, Ventress lost her cool and reacted in fear. She slammed her ship away from her target, breaking the lock. Or so she hoped.

As it turned out, her hope was short-lived. With a burst of fire and disintegrating safety covering, her target launched a pair of missiles. They floated for a moment, before identifying her as their target and igniting their motors. Ventress accelerated again, soaring ahead of the ship. As she did, _another_ shriek filled her cockpit;

The ship had front missile systems too!

In seconds, predator had become prey, and prey predator.

Ventress swore in her native language and dived "down" (towards the gas giant), just as her former prey (now possibly predator) launched a second pair of missiles at her. This new pair joined the first and tracked Ventress relentlessly.

Seeing that her gambit had failed, Ventress soared "up" again, the missiles hot on her tail. Almost panicking, she searched the space around her for a way to survive. Nothing, except for the two capital ships. A plan fell together in Ventress's mind. She would steal a tactic from Skywalker. Over Christophsis, the young Jedi had killed Admiral Trench by using the Admiral's own missiles against his bridge. Ventress could pull of something similar. That would do.

With an idea (however shaky) of what to do, Ventress charged the closest ship, the missiles right on her tail.

The ship grew in her vision. Still the missiles gained on her. In desperation, Ventress dumped all power from her weapons into shields and her engines. The missiles fell behind, but not far enough. Ventress ignored them and focused instead on the ship. It rushed up to meet her, green hull glinting. In seconds, she would smash into it.

Before that happened, Ventress pulled up sharply, slamming herself into her seat with extreme inertial forces, but breaking the locks. Devoid of a target, the missiles soared on, straight towards the ship. Ventress leveled off, holding position a good two dozen meters above the ship, smiled again-

Then felt her jaw drop as the missiles simply exploded a good dozen meters from the hull of the ship. Shrapnel spun harmlessly away from the points of detonation.

The Sith's mind raced. Maybe the missiles had some kind of system that triggered their warheads if they missed their target. Or something like that-

But that sadly (at least for Ventress) wasn't the case. As Ventress continued alone the hull of the ship, she could see that the point of impact glowed slightly.

The larger ships had shields too.

Ventress swore again, wondering what else was going to go wrong.

Below her, as far as she could see, sections of the hull slid apart, and towers emerged.

No, not towers. _Turrets. _Hundreds of them.  
Ventress had, to use the old spacers saying, jumped from the burning ship into hard vacuum.

The Rattataki only had enough time to say "Oh Sith" before every turret (and the ones on the ship on the opposite side of her, which she had forgotten about) opened up simultaneously.

* * *

"Point defense systems activated!" The _Kelly_'s Weapons officer called out. "All autocannons functioning normally. Confirmation from the _Arthur_; Target Alpha is boxed in."

"Excellent." Keyes tapped her clenched left hand into her right palm, a movement she had inherited from her father, minus the elder Keyes's pipe. "Juliet, get me an estimate on the damage done to the target."

"Nothing lasting so far, ma'am." The AI replied through the bridge speakers. "It's got shields, and we haven't managed to crack them yet. But the pilot's throwing it around the sky, so at least we know our autocannons will eventually punch through."

"Good. Keep shooting, and alert me when it's down and out."

"Yes ma'am." Juliet fell silent again. Keyes turned to another member of her bridge crew, this one manning the Communications station.

"Any word from the Spartans?" She inquired.

"No, ma'am." The officer replied. He adjusted several dials on his panel and then turned back to Keyes. "But we are getting status information from their armor. They're still alive, and unharmed, as far as we can tell. We also received an information burst form their AI. It's being unpacked now, but it's going to take a while. It's massive."

"Keep at it. And the exfil Pelican?"

"Still ready. The pilots complaining about just sitting in the hanger."

"Tell her to hold tight. She'll be in the black soon."

The Communications officer nodded in response, and relayed the orders to the Pelican. He started to say something, but Juliet cut him off.

"Target Alpha has disengaged!" She reported. "The ship is making a bee-line for the edge of the system. Orders?"

"Let it go." Keyes resumed tapping her hands. "But get me the CO of Wardog Squadron."

"Aye. Initiating COM connection...done." Juliet's voice faded, replaced by a gruff male voice, the commanding officer of Cutlass Squadron Wardog.

"Blaze here. Orders, Captain?"

Keyes smiled. She'd worked with Blaze before, during the Battle of Instillation 00. He was a good pilot. She could trust him to get the job done.

"Good to hear from you again, Blaze." Keyes banished the smile from her face, returning to her previous level of military calm. "I have a target for your squadron."

"Name it." Blaze's voice took on a hint of anticipation.

"The ship that's been buzzing us is bugging out. I want you to take it out."

"Consider it space dust, ma'am. Chopper wants payback for the scare that SOB gave his buddy in the Advanced Longsword."

"Actually, try and keep it in one piece. I want to have something to give to ONI to study."

"Understood. We'll do our best."

"That's all I'm asking for. Good luck."

"Thanks, but we don't need it." Blaze cut the COM link, but not before Keyes heard him say "Wardog, engaging". Keyes smiled again.

Whoever was piloting this ship, they were about to enter a world of pain.

* * *

Flight Officer Alvin "Chopper" Davenport was angry. Before him was the cause of his anger; the ship that had almost shot his buddy Swordsman, alias Longsword Blade 1. Behind him was the rest of his flight, one of three in his squadron; fellow Flight Officers Kai "Edge" Nagasai, "Archer" Grimm, and their CO Lieutenant "Blaze" (if he had any real name, Chopper had never heard it.) The latter was currently speaking to Chopper.

"You have point." Blaze said. "We'll cover you. Just remember; the Captain wants this ship in one piece. Don't go overboard with the destruction."

"Understood, sir." Chopper replied. He shut off his COM and focused on the ship. He took a quick mental inventory of his fighter's capabilities.

The Cutlass-class fighter was the most advanced single ship in the UNSC. It was visually similar to the Saber-class interceptor built towards the end of the Human-Covenant war, but that was quite a bit more effective. It too, carried shields, but they were much stronger than the ones on the Saber, having been built with Covenant technology. It's engines could propel it to the same speed as a Seraph fighter, and that thrust could be shunted through a series of thrusters around the ship's frame for increased maneuverability. Its weapons consisted of four 120mm rotary cannons, two Class-2 Energy Guns (the same cannons used on the Banshee and Seraph), two Model 6 Nonlinear Cannons (upgraded, vehicle-mounted versions of the famous "Spartan Laser") a Plasma Torpedo system, and a Scorpion anti-vehicle missile system. Its targeting software was backed up by a pseudomicro AI, meaning every shot went where it was supposed to, as long as the pilot had a target in mind. And if it wasn't already deadly enough, it's hull was stealth-coated with the same material as a Prowler, and it could be modified to carry an active camouflage system (at the expense of it's plasma cannons, as the ammunition for them tended to emit radiation that messed with the camo.)

Some people considered the fighters weaponry and equipment excessive. Cutlass pilots, however, had a saying to respond; "Well, you've got a choice; an excessive ship, or a glassed planet."

That was usually enough to quiet any dissent.

The ship he was targeting, on the other hand, seemed to be less heavily equipped. They were sure it had shields, possibly some form of weapon system (judging from the barrels emerging from the pods on it's top and bottom) and, apparently, a FTL drive. Other than that, nothing was known about it.

Well, there was only one way to find out.

Chopper narrowed his eyes. The ship was fast, that was sure. He was soaring at 95 percent engine power, and the thing was still outrunning him.

But if there was one thing that Chopper knew from pilot training, when it came to advanced ships, speed came at the cost of armor and weapons. So, while his target may have been a speed demon, it probably wasn't the toughest thing in space. That, and apparently his stealth coating was working; the target wasn't taking any evasive maneuvers.

"Acquire lock on." He said clearly into the dead air of his cockpit. His AI heard him, recognized his command, and quickly brought up a holographic reticule on his HUD. It wavered, then solidified.

"Charge Model 6's." He said. A pair of bars appeared on either side of the reticle; charge indicators for his Cutlass's Nonlinear Cannons. They rose quickly, topping off in seconds. Chopper smiled fiendishly.

"Die." He whispered. He squeezed the triggers on his control yoke.

* * *

Even when she was being shot at from all angles buy the turrets, Ventress didn't panic. Same for when her shields fell to almost nothing and the pounding her ship was taking got worse. Not even when she pulled out from between the two ships and gunned her engines for the edge of the system did she panic.

That moment came when Chopper's lasers impacted her weakened shields, punched through, and gutted the back section of her ship.

Part of the reason for this panic was that Ventress hadn't noticed Chopper sliding onto her six. As the Saber pilot had guessed, Ventress's sensors had failed to pick it up. And having the ship you are currently piloting suddenly break is a traumatic experience, even for someone with Sith training.

It actually took Ventress a whole half-minute to realize that her ship was holed. She only noticed it when, as she attempted to maneuver for a jump into hyperspace, the craft refused to respond. Chopper's shots had cut through the back of the cockpit, not close enough to expose Ventress to vacuum, or breach the ship's engines, but in just the right spot to cut her controls and leave the Sith dead in space.

It was, as Blaze would tell Chopper during their debriefing, "One hell of a shot."

In vain, Ventress tried to re-route the command signals through an undamaged system. Unfortunately, there weren't any. Ventress was about to smash something when she felt her ship move beneath her. For a moment, she thought something had worked.

But a quick flick of the control yoke showed the ship wasn't moving under it's own power. Now, it was just another object in space. And as such, it was obeying the unbreakable laws of physics; in short, her ship (and by extension her) was being pulled into the gravitational well of the frigate.

Ventress blinked in confusion, wondering how it was possible for her to end up in such a situation. Then she tightened her crash harness and braced against the coming impact.

* * *

"Boo yah!" Chopper howled. He punched the air, or tried to. The confines of his cockpit made it hard for him to move. He settled for raising his hand off the control yoke a couple inches. He quickly returned them as he noticed the ship start a slow decent towards the larger ship (which was classified as a frigate by it's makers, according to the recent data burst by the Spartan's AI Penny). Chopper turned with it, keeping his reticule on the ship as it descended. He glanced at the power levels of his Cannons, noticing them rise quickly, aided by the advanced reactor powering his Cutlass. He kept turning, lining his craft up for a killing shot. Just as his cannons reached full power, and as he fine-tuned his final shot, Blaze cut in over the radio.

"Break off, Chopper." He barked. Chopper jumped in his seat, startled.

"Sir, I have the shot! What-"

"That's an order. We're supposed to disable the ship, not destroy it. You've done that. Now. Break. Off." The tone of his flight lead's voice left no room for argument. Chopper sighed.

"Breaking off." He hauled his ship around to meet with his flight, watching the ship fade in his rear camera.

_Well, _he thought in self-comforting, _the only place that ship is going is where the Spartan's are. That pilot's dead anyway. If the crash doesn't get them, the Spartan's will._

Smiling under his flight helmet, Chopper rejoined his flight.

* * *

The hanger of the frigate was filled with the deadly light of lasers. On one side of the massive barrage of visual-range radiation was Christian's half of Alpha Team. On the other was a large compliment of droids (Penny, noticing the Spartan's predicament, had gotten on the COM with all the information she could dig out of the ship's system on the robots they'd been fighting, including the fact they were officially titled "battle droids").

Naming didn't matter much to the Spartan-IV's, however. Droid or robot, it was still a target to be taken out. And "taking out" was what the IV's in the hanger were doing.

Christian fired of a short burst at the mass of targets before him, scoring a direct hit on the droid leading the charge. It fell, sparking and twitching, to the deck, joining the many other busted machines that littered the area before the door. Half a dozen more joined it as Kelly pulled of an impressive series of headshots, the debris of which were quickly scattered over a large area as the droid Matt had been aiming at simply exploded.

"This thing rules!" Kelly exclaimed, cutting down a fresh row of droids that came through the door. "I am so keeping one of these!"

Christian had to agree with his team's sniper. Thought the guns were (in his opinion) ugly, they were incredibly damaging against this new enemy (even more so that his Battle Rifle), and they had a huge ammo capacity. Christian had approximated it's magazine size at an amazing 500 rounds. And since a single well-placed round could disable or destroy a droid, a single clip was far more ammo than needed to deal with just about any squad sized grouping of enemies.

It did have its drawbacks, however. As Matt had found out quickly, rapid fire caused it to become uncomfortably hot, which would have been a problem had he not been wearing MJLONIR MK VI/B armor, as like the MK VI before it, it carried a temperature regulation system for the wearer. It was also surprisingly fragile, as Christian discovered when he used the one in his left hand to bash a droid that got to close and broke not just the droid but the gun.

Still, despite its problems, the gun was serving Alpha Team quite well. With the amount of ammunition and back-up weapons strewn around their hiding place, the Spartan's could hold their position for hours.

Ironically, they held it for only a full minute more.

Kelly, taking a break to reload, noticed something out of the corner of her eye. As the team's sniper, she'd received training to enhance her naturally good vision, followed by the augmentation process that made them even sharper. As such, she didn't need to turn her head to get a good picture of whatever she'd seen. It took her a second to realize it was a ship.

"Boss, there's a ship outside!" She called to Christian, turning back to the door just in time to grease a couple more droids. Christian heard her, and turned to look.

He saw a ship, just as Kelly had, but his fuller attention on it provided more details for him than Kelly had noticed. First, he saw the ship was not UNSC design. That much was obvious. Second, it was trailing a comets-tail of smoke and debris, meaning it was probably damaged. Finally, it was coming towards them, fast, and showed now sign of slowing down or adjusting course.

_Whatever damaged it must have knocked out its control systems._ He thought. Because he was feeling relatively safe (Kelly and Matt had actually started to push the droids back without him), he calculated the where the ship might go if its current trajectory wasn't altered. What he learned didn't please him.

He and his team were standing directly in the line.

In that second, Christian made a decision.

"Fall back!" He bellowed.

"What?" Kelly and Matt shouted in unison.

"But we're finally winning!" Matt added.

"That's an order!" Christian fired a quick series of bursts at the droids, then picked himself up and sprinted towards the door at the opposite end of the hanger. A quick pause and exchanged glance later, Matt and Kelly followed him. As they did, Matt glanced over his shoulder to check on the droids and saw the approaching ship, which had sped up as it neared the center of the frigate's mass.

"Rescind what I said earlier." He said, before doubling his speed, sprinting past Kelly, who, always one for a competition, on or off the battlefield, accelerated to catch up. Together, they caught up to Christian, who had entered the open door.

"Where to now, sir?" Matt asked, not even breathing hard from his run.

"Further into the ship, see if we can meet up with Hester's group." Christian ordered. "I don't want to be anywhere near that hanger when-"

Christian's sentence (and his forward momentum) was cut violently short when he literally ran into Hester, who (followed by Echo, Coraline and Ahsoka) had been making her way towards the hanger. The two Spartans rebounded from the collision with grunts, falling on their backs with shields shimmering.

"Well, at least that's one problem solved." Kelly deadpanned.

"Apparently so." Matt said, just as calmly. Coraline and Echo helped their teammates to their feet.

"Good to see you again, sir." Hester said, standing with a groan and help from Coraline.

"Likewise." Christian replied. "But we can talk later. We need to get out of here, now."

"But we just got here!" Coraline groaned.

"Then stay here and get fried." Christian snapped. Quickly, he jogged down the hall.

"Fried?" Coraline wondered out loud. She looked at the three females in her group. All shrugged. Deciding to puzzle it out later, the four followed Christian, Kelly and Matt around the corner. They found the three other Spartans pressing themselves against the wall. They joined them. Moments ticked by, with nothing happening. Hester turned to her boss, who she was crouching next to.

"So, why are we hiding behind this wall?" She asked. Christian ignored her, and as she stopped talking she noticed he was muttering something. She listened closer.

"Five...four...three...two...one..."

The moment Christian's countdown reached zero, Ventress's ship completed it's gravity-initiated arc into the frigates hanger, an event noticed by Hester, who had leaned out around the corner in an attempt to find out what had cause her boss to freak out.

The disabled fighter soared through the magnetic field that protected the hanger from the vacuum of space, still trailing its line of debris. As it passed through, fires ignited along it's length, the small sparks that had been sputtering within it gaining power upon exposure to slightly-pressurized oxygen. The carcass of the ship fought for a moment with the draw of the frigates artificial gravity, but finally succumbed, slamming into the deck with a massive shriek of metal on metal. More sparks erupted from the meter-deep gouge that formed as the ship bled its forward momentum into the deck, quickly gaining power and spreading. They engulfed everything in the hanger in seconds, including the few droids left standing, the many destroyed ones on the deck, and finally a collection of droid starfighter fuel cells. These quickly reached a critical temperature and detonated violently, bringing the whole symphony of destruction to a brilliant, billowing climax. The blast spread in all directions, filling the hanger and roaring out into space. It leaked out anywhere there was oxygen;

Including the hall the Spartan's were hiding in.

Hester fell back from her view point just in time to avoid being roasted by the firestorm.

Just as quickly as it had started, the fire died, leaving nothing but many meters of blackened deck and wall and the soft tinkle of heated metal cooling and contracting. The Spartans picked themselves up gingerly, quickly checking for any injuries. Thankfully, there were none.

"So that's what we were hiding from." Hester said quietly.

"Fuck, how did you see that coming?" Coraline added in awe.

"Well, large billowing explosions are what usually follow ship crashes, aren't they?" Christian explained. "I figured there might be an explosion. So, not knowing the size of it, or that there would actually be one, I chose to hide here instead. Just to be safe."

_Good plan. _Echo signed. Christian shrugged.

"Wait, ship?" Ahsoka wondered out loud. "You don't think-"

"It worked. That's all that matters." Christian cut her off. He paused, turning to look over the other half of his team and Ahsoka. He quickly signaled for his team to take up positions around the door, which they proceeded to do. Ahsoka, not having anything else to do, joined them. Hester made to do the same, but Christian stopped her.

"Anything new to report?" He asked.

"Nothing really, sir." Hester assumed a stance of attention, hands behind her back. Her standard posture for a briefing/debriefing. "After you and the rest of the team fell down that hole in the bridge, Coraline and I received your coordinates from Penny. We decided to meet up with you, and proceeded towards your projected landing point."

"The hanger out there." Christian guessed. Hester nodded.

"Yes, sir. Along the way, we encountered Echo, who was currently in melee combat with Ahsoka. We managed to break it up...barely."

"I'm going to assume Echo wasn't too happy with that."

"No sir. But she didn't seem interested in killing Ahsoka. To me, it looked more like she was well..." Hester trailed off.

"You can speak freely." Christian stated, answering Hester's unasked question. The girl nodded in response.

"Well, it looked like she was playing with her. You know, like a cat."

"I do know." Christian said quietly. "Continue."

"Right." Hester drew new breath. "Anyway, after meeting up with Echo and Ahsoka, we heard about that ship that was approaching. The one that worried Ahsoka."

"Probably the same one that's now burning in the hanger."

"Affirmative." Hester paused again. "After that, we met up with you."

"Alright. Now we need-"

Christian was cut off as Kelly's status light blinked orange. He jogged to her position, followed by Hester. The sniper motioned with her free hand, giving the _look out carefully_ sign. Christian complied.

His eyes registered the hanger, now burning and blackened. There was quite a bit more debris in the area, both from the crashed ship's entry and the resulting explosion of the fuel cells. Nothing moved, except for the flicker of flames and the occasional spark of busted electronics.

Then something else did. Christian tracked it instantly, eyes locking on like a missile targeting system. A figure, hunched and coughing, emerged from the opposite side of the ship, using it for support. A window popped up in Christian's HUD; a 15x magnified view of the figure as seen through Kelly's sniper scope.

He didn't like what he saw. The figure was humanoid, even more so than Ahsoka, but quite obviously not human. First, it's skin was far, far to pale, practically chalk white. It was completely bald as well (Christian couldn't even see any eyebrows), and it's skin was marked with either natural markings or tattoos of some form. Finally (though it wouldn't be noticed by anyone without the extensive visual identification training the Spartans received) it's bone structure was wrong for it to be human. The figure was long and lean, like a knife, Christian thought. A body build for two things; fighting and survival. Very little else.

As if to prove Christian right, the figure lifted her head (it had breasts, Christian noticed, so he guessed it was female), showing eyes that were quite obviously not even close to human. Even from here, Christian could see the hate in them.

Had he had the experience in the areas of the Force he would receive in the coming months at that time, Christian just might have been a little worried. Now, the only only feeling running through him was exhilaration.

_I wonder if Echo would like her head_, he thought quite calmly. _She doesn't really have that many body parts in her collection_.

Something nudged Christian's shoulder. He looked over from the female figure to see Ahsoka standing next to him. Only his training and the unspoken need for stealth prevented him from hurling the alien girl across the hall.

"Ventress." Ahsoka hissed. Christian couldn't figure out if this was an insult in Ahsoka's native language or the name of the figure.

"Huh?" Hester hissed in response, solving Christian's dilemma for him.

"The pilot." Ahsoka indicated the figure with a tic of her head. "Asajj Ventress. She's the person I warned you about earlier."

"Well shit." Coraline swore. "And here I was hoping that she was dead."

"No such luck." Ahsoka sighed, and fell back behind the bend in the hall. Christian, after ordering most of his team to hold position, followed her. As they rounded the corner, Ahsoka turned to face him, arms crossed.

"Okay, I can tell you guys obviously hate aliens," She said, with a hint of bite in her voice. "But it looks we're going to have to work together."

"What for?" Christian's question wasn't angry, but genuinely curious. "What do we get out of it?"

"Well, you, your team, and probably everyone you care for gets a chance to not be made into slaves, and your government gets to survive long enough to get back on it's feet."

"Fair enough. Still, why do you need our help specifically. Is just one freaky xeno bitch is too much for you?" Christian snapped back, smiling under his helmet as he did.

"She'd be more than a match for your entire team." Ahsoka countered. Christian actually laughed at this.

"Oh, I doubt that." He calmed quickly. "But if your offering to help, I'm not going to turn it down. You know this bitch, correct?"

"All to well." Ahsoka scowled (or pulled her face into what Christian assumed was a scowl).

"Then you can be of some help. But we'll need a plan."

"Already have one." Ahsoka's scowl turned into a smile.

"Oh really?" Christian felt mildly impressed. "Is it risky?"

"Probably. But-"

"Is it above the skill of normal soldiers?"

"Most likely. Still-"

"Does it require stealth?"

"Yes. So-"

"No need for details. That comes later." Christian stepped closer to Ahsoka, gun held loosely in his hands. "Just wanted to make sure you had the right stuff to work with the Spartans. You're good to join. At least, unofficially." He lowered the gun completely and offered his right hand to her. "Welcome to Alpha, Ahsoka."

The girl hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she took Christian's hand and shook it firmly.

"Glad to be part..." She blinked, realizing she didn't know the Spartan's name.

"Christian."

"Christian." Ahsoka released his hand and walked a couple paces away. "Now, I believe we have a common enemy to take care of? Let's see what your team has."

"Straight to the point." Christian smiled under his helmet again, but this time from real joy. For a xeno, this girl was good. "We're going to make a great team."


	7. The Battle of Point Alliance

**Chapter 6**

**The Battle of Point Alliance**

On the bridge of the Star Destroyer _Resolute_, Admiral Yularen paced. It had been quite a while since the last message from the boarding team (a signal showing they'd arrived safely, and were beginning their mission), and the Admiral was worried. Then there's been the whole arrival of the _Ginivex-_class fighter, which proceeded to attack the unknown ships before being shot down by their single-ships. All in all, the situation was grim. He glanced at the clone officer at the communications station. He simply shook his head. Yularen sighed and resumed his pacing. He was about to go over and check the comm logs himself when the tactical screen lit up. The Admiral rushed over, scanning it quickly and hoping it wasn't what he thought it was.

Unfortunately, it was. The Separatist fleet they'd raced here had finally caught up, and had just dropped out of lightspeed. An overwhelming force. Yularen cursed under his breath, and turned to the weapons station, about to give an order to open fire when the communications officer finally spoke up.

"Sir, just got something!" He called. Yularen joined him, scanning the screen. Sure enough, there was a message...but it wasn't on any frequency used by the Republic, or the Separatists, for that matter.

"It's a holomessage, sir." The clone informed him. "Came in a couple seconds ago. I didn't notice until now because it's not on any of our or their channels. Should I play it?"

"Yes. Put it on the main holotable." Yularen instructed, before moving to said holotable to view the message. Their was a crackle of static, then the image solidified. Yularen found himself looking at the holographic form of Ahsoka.

"Go ahead, Commander." He addressed Ahsoka, hands behind his back. "What is your situation?"

"Bad, but not horrible." The Jedi replied. "I've been separated from the main force, but they're still in one piece from what I can tell and moving my way as we speak. But I've got more important news." The girl paused, and stepped to the side, allowing some one else to step into the holographic representation.

The person who'd joined her was clad in striking battle armor, like nothing Yularen had ever seen before. It reminded him of Mandolorian armor, but looked more advanced, as well as thicker. It glowed slightly, even in the holographic image projected by the table.

"Admiral Yularen, I'd like to introduce Master Chief Petty Officer Christian-122. He's the head of the boarding party from the ships we saw earlier."

"Sir." Christian snapped a salute, quick and decisive. Yularen nodded.

"Apparently, we are currently in space belonging to a civilization known as the United Earth Government. The ships we're seeing belonged to their military, the United Nations Space Command. It's their station General Skywalker saw. When this frigate made a blind jump, it somehow passed into the edge of UEG space, and the station alerted them to its presence. The UNSC, in response, sent the two ships we saw and the Spartans."

"Spartans?" Yularen questioned.

"Christian's group. According to him, they're special ops soldiers of the UNSC. Their the equivalent of our Republic Commandos."

"The best of the best." Christian added. Ahsoka shrugged and continued.

"It looks like we're on the same side, sir." She said. "I've given them a run-through of the situation, the war and all, and from what Christian's told me, the UNSC doesn't want to fight."

"So they aren't a threat." Yularen rubbed his chin in thought.

"I wouldn't say that." Ahsoka glanced at Christian, still standing at attention. "Christian's made it very clear that they will fight back if we invade. But they won't fight unless we start it."

"Be assured, Christian, that will not happen." Yularen said to the armored soldier, "The Republic has no intention of starting another war."

"Glad you share our view, sir." Christian said. Ahsoka continued.

"Also, we've got some trouble. Ventress is here, on the frigate."

"So it was her fighter that dropped in system." Yularen muttered.

"Well, it obviously ran into trouble." Christian said. "Cause right now, it's a busted wreck in the hanger."

"We think she might have been a scout for a bigger force." Ahsoka moved on. Yularen glanced over at the tactical screen. The enemy ships were still there, approaching slowly from the edge of the system.

"You are correct, Commander." Yularen stated, turning back. "That same fleet is approaching our position now."

"Can you handle them?" Ahsoka questioned. Yularen nodded.

"If you can keep Ventress busy so she doesn't rejoin them and take command, yes."

"We can do that." Christian pressed his left fist into his right palm, and over the link Yularen was sure he heard them crack loudly.

"I hope so. We won't be able to send you any reinforcements during the battle."

"General Skywalker is en-route to us as we speak. He should be able to handle her."

"We've got her back as well." Christian added. "I've got five Spartans pissed off and ready to kick some serious ass. One pasty alien chick isn't going to stand against us."

"Very well. Proceed as you see fit, Commander." Yularen stood up to his full height. He found himself strangely looking forward to the coming battle.

"I will, Admiral." Ahsoka turned to Christian. "Any questions?"

"Just one." Christian's form turned to Yularen. "You said this...Ventress, was it?"

"Asajj Ventress, yes."

"You said she could take command of those ships?"

"Yes. She is one of the higher commanders of the Separatist Alliance."

"So she's a Hotel-Victor-Tango." Christian muttered to himself. "Thank you, sir. No more questions."

"Very well. Now, I have a battle planned." Yularen paused. "Commander, the UNSC ships-"

"Won't fire on you, don't worry." Ahsoka jerked her head in Christian's direction. "He sent a message to them. You're marked as friendlies on their scanners now. They've acknowledged, as well."

She turned to Christian, who looked had his hand to his helmet.

"Just got a word from the Captain," He explained. "She says if you need help fighting the fleet off, contact her. I'm sending the COM frequency now."

The Admiral glanced at the communications officer, still at his station. The clone nodded, showing the data had been received.

"Excellent. Good luck, Commander." Yularen nodded to Ahsoka, who returned it. The hologram dissolved with a warble.

Yularen paused, wondering if he should contact the UNSC ships. He decided against it.

He wouldn't be needing their help. If anything, their primitive ships would get in the way of his own.

He turned to his communication officer.

"Contact our escorts." He ordered. "Tell them to prepare for battle."

* * *

Across the black of space, Captain Miranda Keyes gazed intently at the small holographic screen on her chair's arm aboard the _Kelly_, waiting for the Republic to return her offer for assistance. So far, they hadn't. Keyes had guessed they wouldn't. From the tense report she had unexpectedly received from Christian, reporting on the situation there, she'd guessed this "Galactic Republic" (as she had been told the name of the government the ships belonged too was called) thought themselves higher technologically than the UNSC. And therefore, the UNSC was less capable at fighting than they were.

Ironically, the Covenant made that very same mistake. And look where it was now.

Keyes smirked and leaned back in her chair, turning off the holo-screen.

"Ship status?" She asked Juliet. Now that the _Kelly _was at combat readiness, the bridge's non-essential power had returned, and the AI responded through her avatar (not, as her name would suggest, a Shakespeare character, but rather an older version of Penny's, dressed in a Naval uniform and with a large military radio set pressed to her ears, befitting her role as Penny's "older sister", so to speak,) on the holotank near Keyes seat.

"All weapons and defenses online and in order," She replied calmly. "Propulsion is green across the board as well." She paused, then continued. "The _Arthur_ is at the same level. We are ready to proceed with whatever orders you give."

"Good." Keyes tapped her hand on her palm again. "Bring up an estimate on those ships that just jumped in."

"The Confederacy of Independent Systems ones, ma'am?"

"If that's what their alliance is to, then yes." Keyes looked down at the screen that popped to life before her. One of the things that had been installed on the newest of UNSC ships was a large holographic system that surrounded the commander, similar to the ones on Covenant ships. Before Keyes eyes blossomed a pair of ship profiles; next to them were a number, the estimated number in the recently arrived CIS battle group. The first was the same shape as the frigate that Alpha Team was currently on. There were eight or so in the new group. The second was something new; a massive circular ship, really nothing more than a globe-like body attached to a bank of engines, with a long pair of apparently hollow arms wrapping around it. There was only one in the fleet, surrounded on all sides by the frigates.

"I have an ID on the larger ship," Juliet said. "According to the file sent by Penny, it's a _Lucrehulk_-class cargo ship. From what I can tell, it was originally a freight hauler, but was modified by it's owners as a ship of the line. The CIS uses them as command centers, primarily."

"Interesting." Keyes muttered. "Anything else I should know about?"  
"They carry fighters as well. Lots of them."

"Hmmm. Alert our single ships, then." She ordered. "Tell them to get ready for some dogfighting."

"Yes ma'am."

"And get a targeting solution on the enemy ships."

"Which one?"

"All of them. An individual solution for each one."

"Done."

"Good. Give me a full view of the fight."

A new window appeared in Keyes display; a representation of the space around them. The UNSC ships were at the bottom, with the space before them awash with contacts representing their Advanced Longswords and Cutlasses. Farther out still, the three Republic "Star Destroyers" (which Keyes thought was an odd name to give a ship supposedly designed to protect democracy, a fact that at least partially explained why most of the information Penny had sent listed them as either Jedi or Republic Cruisers), tagged as friendly, and the larger force of nine CIS ships which were still listed as enemies. Keyes waved her hand through the hologram, and it zoomed in, showing just the Republic and CIS ships. The moved together. The Captain tapped this, and the screen zoomed more, showing a live-action view from the external cameras. Keyes watched the two forces move together, lines of light suddenly appearing from between them.

"Do you have damage estimates on the ships?" She asked. Juliet nodded, and small status windows opened beside the ships, showing estimated shield and hull strength. Keyes nodded in approval.

"Keep watch on the Republic ships." She told Juliet.

"Ma'am?" The AI replied.

"The moment one starts to show signs of being in danger of destruction, target the nearest enemy ship."

"Yes ma'am." Juliet paused, then looked curiously at Keyes.

"May I ask what you're planning?" She wondered out loud. Keyes smiled, the same cold grin from before.

"I'm planning to prove to both the Republic and their friends what happens when you mess with the UNSC." She whispered. "And I'm going to do it by utterly demolishing the CIS fleet."

"A good plan." Juliet fell silent, simply watching her Captain.

Keyes smiled coldly again, and leaned back in her seat to await her moment to act.

* * *

Battered, bruised, but still alive, Ventress limped free of the wreck that had once been her fighter. She was glad she was still in one piece, but a small part of her wished she'd died in the crash; Dooku was certainly not going to be pleased that she had wrecked the expensive ship. In addition, now that her favorite ship was totaled, she'd have to use her back up, the cephalopod-like _Trident_,until she got a replacement. If she got one, that was. Not that she didn't like the _Trident_. She just preferred the fanblade models more. They were fast and deadly. Which was how she liked to think of herself.

Still aching from the crash, Ventress moved quickly away from her fighter. She didn't know how much damage had been done to it, and she really didn't want to be near it if it's engines had been breached. She'd caused enough engine breaches herself to know, that was for sure.

Still, at least she was alone in this hanger. Not even a droid to ask for orders. Though at this point, she would probably cut the stupid machine down with her lightsabers if one did.

As if the Force had heard her, the metallic sound of a battle droid walking reached her ears. Ventress whirled, rage rising within her. But her eyes saw nothing.

No, not quite. On the floor, still rattling, was a the head of a B1 series battle droid. Ventress relaxed, and looked down at the head. Something about it unnerved her. She couldn't understand why. With the pounding this frigate had received, there must be hundreds of destroyed droids all over it's floating hulk. Why wouldn't there be one here?

Still, Ventress didn't like it. She looked closer at the head. She quickly noticed it was still warm, so much so that she could see the heat rising off it in waves. Most likely, her crash had ripped it loose of it's body.

Ventress shook off the sense of unease that had settled over her. She couldn't let it distract her. Now that she'd cleared the way for the her Master's force, the only task remaining to her was to get off the frigate by some means and regroup with them.

With goal in mind, Ventress dusted herself off and headed for the passage that lead to the outer ring of the ship; there were obviously no working ships in the hanger, so her next best bet would be to check for a lifepod. Though they didn't have hyperdrives, they'd still let her get off the ship and get to the point she'd jumped into, so she could be-

Ventress paused again. A feeling, either the Force or her species hard-wired sense of danger made her sweep the area round her. Nothing moved. At least, it seemed that way.

With suddenness that surprised even her, Ventress pulled her lightsabers free of their resting places on her belt, activated them, and skillfully blocked the descending blade that had been headed for her back. With her head no longer in danger of being forcefully removed from her body (for the moment), Ventress took the couple seconds she had to observe her opponent.

Her face tugged into a smile, despite the pain it caused, when she saw who it was. Skywalker's Padawan. Somehow, she wasn't terribly surprised.

"So, we meet again, pet." She whispered. Ahsoka (that was the annoying girls name, wasn't it?) glared at her. But the Force showed she didn't have any anger to back her expression up. She was weak, like the rest of the Jedi.

"New place, same taunt I see." She replied. Ventress grit her teeth. One of the things (and there were many) she disliked about Skywalker's apprentice was her attitude. She decided to make her pay for it, as well as being a Jedi. This time, she didn't have anything to distract her from the fight. The last time they had clashed, Ventress's mission had been to rescue Nute Gunray, and so she'd had to break off her fight with the girl (and Luminara Unduli, of all people) to get the Neimoidian's slimy hide to safety, something that still pained her. She'd taken a small amount of vengeance by killing that worthless Senate Guard traitor Argyus, but she still wished she'd killed Ahsoka when she'd had the chance. Taking out Unduli would have been a bonus.

And now apparently she'd been given that chance. Ventress laughed, out loud and in Ahsoka's face, then pushed herself away from Ahsoka using the girl's lightsaber as a point of thrust. She skidded back, as did her opponent. Ventress decided that it was time for some more taunting.

"So, without your Master, I see." She drawled. "A pity. I would have preferred more of a challenge."

In response, Ahsoka laughed.

"Oh, my Master's not here," She said, smiling in a way that showed just how predatory her teeth were. "But that doesn't mean I'm alone."

Then, as if signaling someone, Ahsoka clenched her hand and dropped it to her side.

Ventress was still trying to figure out what this meant when the speeding, armored fist (that she had somehow failed to sense through the Force) collided with her back.

Ventress was hurled across the deck by the force of the blow, almost far enough to slam into the opposite wall of the hanger from where she'd been. She managed to stop herself with a concentrated burst of the Force, but fell face-first onto the metal below her as, strangely, the Force seemingly refused to work. Ventress got to her feet, pain lancing up her back, and tried again to touch the Force. It was there, and, in retaliation for the blow, Ventress used it to hurl a large crate at Ahsoka. The girl caught it easily with her own Force manipulation, lightsaber held in her opposite hand, far easier than she should have. Ventress didn't trouble herself with the event. The crate was only a distraction. While the girl held it above her head, Ventress charged, lightsabers ready. She aimed a killing at the the Togruta's midsection...

Only to cry out as she felt herself flying through the air. Something had grabbed her leg. Instinctively, Ventress glanced down at whatever was there.

What she saw didn't make sense to her.

_There was nothing there._

Below her was nothing but empty air. Yet, it felt like something hard and metallic was grasping her ankle.

And then it wasn't, and Ventress was flying through the air. She slammed to the deck, reaching out with the Force to find whatever was causing this strange phenomena.

Nothing came back. The only living things in this hanger were her and Ahsoka.

But as if to prove her wrong, her nose exploded. At least, that was how it felt to the Sith. In reality, whatever had hit her back and thrown her had now slammed into her face, breaking her nose. Blood sprayed through the air, and Ventress jerked back, vainly trying to use the Force to banish the pain from her skull. As she looked, she could have sworn she saw a small patch of her blood float in the air before her.

The hit to the face was probably making her see things, she decided.

From her right came the all-to-real threat here; Ahsoka, lightsaber held at ready.

"Surrender." She ordered. "Come quietly, and I won't have to really hurt you."

"Never." Ventress spat. She reached out with the Force, hoping to throw the annoying Jedi across the hanger.

Nothing happened. Ahsoka's right head-tail moved, once, but that was her twitching. Then her face broke in a grin.

"Looks like your use of the Dark Side's come back to bite you." She taunted. "You're losing your connection."

Ventress blinked in horror. What the girl was saying was impossible. Rage filled her. She shoved again, and this time she got something. Ahsoka was shoved back, but barely a meter. The girl returned the Force push, but this time nothing happened for her. Ventress laughed.

"Now who's losing their connection?" She sneered. Ahsoka glared at her. Ventress returned it, despite the pain it caused.

But then she stopped, face falling still. Ahsoka did the same thing. The two Force-sensitives were feeling the same thing; the Force, both of which they had known for most of their life as a smooth, elegant thing, like the water on a calm pond, was...fluctuating, for lack of a better word. Like the pond of it was being shaken. One moment it was there, another it wasn't. In that instant, realization hit Ventress; the reason that the Force-duel she'd just engaged in had gone so strangely wasn't anything to do with her, or Ahsoka. The Force it self seemed unstable. In this place, where ever they were, the Force wasn't all-encompassing any more. Perhaps, deeper into this section of space, the supposedly-universal energy field might stop existing completely.

Swiftly following the impact of this realization was another physical one, this time to Ventress's arm. Something grabbed it from behind and delivered a massive strike to her elbow. The joint snapped loudly as it went the exact opposite of the direction it was supposed to, and Ventress screamed. But the thing holding her didn't stop there. With a shove, it slammed Ventress face down onto the deck and held her there. The deck rang with the force of the Rattataki contacting metal.

Seconds later, the whole ship was shaking. Inside Ventress's pain-clouded brain, she wondered if her hitting the deck had caused this. Then the force on her back relaxed slightly, letting her see the space outside the ship; it was illuminated with lines of red and blue and white. Turbolasers hurling gigajuels of energy across space at their targets, ion cannons joining as well.

"Looks like your fleet has met mine." Ahsoka commented. Ventress tried to say something in response, but the force behind her slammed down, keeping her stuck to the deck.

Again, Ventress wondered what exactly was going on.

This time, she actually got answers. The whole ship around her seemed to rumble, and the hanger was suddenly filled with blue light. A stray ion cannon blast, from one of the fighting capital ships, had hit the frigate. Arcs of electricity skittered over everything with electronic parts; both of Ventress's lightsabers shut down, as did Ahsoka's.

More importantly, the many arcs generated a mass of chaotic light, which filled the hanger. In this light, Ventress could barely make out the shapes of five humanoids, seemingly completely see-through. One seemed to make a motion, then stopped. There was a click, and the shape solidified; a soldier, wearing luminescent-green battle armor.

Around Ventress, there was a series of clicks and pops. Seemingly out of thin air, four more forms appeared, all wearing the same armor. Another of the noises was directly behind Ventress, lending power to the theory that the force behind her beating was one of these soldiers.

The soldier that had appeared first approached Ventress. As it approached, she noticed the number 122 on its right shoulder. For some reason, the sight of this armored being filled Ventress with dread. In desperation, she reached out with the Force, trying to do something, anything.

But she got nothing. That was what she felt. It was as if the soldier didn't exist.

It proved to be quite real, however, as it signaled its partner on Ventress's back to relax, just enough so that Ventress could sit up. The moment she did, the soldier drove its armored boot deep into her abdomen. Ventress fell, winded.

"Asajj Ventress, I presume." The soldier spoke, in a slightly accented male voice. The accent wasn't like any Ventress had heard.

In response, Ventress spat blood at the soldier's boot. He took it calmly, not even wiping it off.

"Good, you're still alive. We have a couple questions to ask you."

* * *

Christian stared down at the defiant glare on Ventress's face with disgust. From what Ahsoka had told him, he'd been worried that she would be a problem. As it turned out, she wasn't even close. Brutes were harder to take down then she'd been. They hadn't even needed the whole team to do it; Echo had done most of the work.

Though, he admitted to himself, that was probably because of his teams use of the Active Camouflage installed in their armor. When Christian had mentioned it to Ahsoka, the alien girl had quickly agreed it was a good idea to use it. Her suggestion (and the plan that they had basically gone with) was for her to distract Ventress, while the Spartans moved in to disable her. Then they would interrogate her.

But Christian had agreed with the idea of the plan, but not the details. Though he didn't know the Jedi (whatever the fuck kind of rank that was) at all, Christian guessed what she meant by disable. And he disagreed.

So, when he'd needed to pick a teammate to actually confront Ventress, he'd chosen Echo without hesitation, then ordered her to take her down by any means necessary. Unknown to Ahsoka, Echo took this as a cue to do as much bodily damage to her target as possible without killing it.

Exactly what Christian wanted.

Still, even though he'd been expecting it, it was a surprise to see watch Echo assault the alien woman. The strike to the back was anticipated (Christian had specifically ordered it), but grabbing the target by the ankle and throwing her like a hammer wasn't. Not that Christian was disappointed. On the contrary, he felt pride well in him as he watched Echo so effortlessly subdue the supposedly-deadly commander and assassin. He felt good from then on. Not even the sudden glitches in his team's Camo worried him. He'd simply ordered them off. They weren't of any use now, anyway.

Christian looked up from the captured alien to Echo, who was standing on her back, holding her in place. The target wasn't the only thing being held back; Christian could see that Echo wanted nothing more than to rip Ventress limb for limb, maybe even do something nastier.

_Soon_, he signed to her. Echo nodded, and swiped two of her fingers along her faceplate in a downward arc; the famous Spartan Smile. Christian returned it, and looked down at the captive.

"Now, you're going to tell us why this ship is so important that it's got two governments chasing it." He ordered the woman. "And then you're going to tell us where Dooku is." She sneered at him.

"Forget it." She spat. Christian shrugged, pretended to walk away, and then turned as fast as his augmented reflexes would let him and slammed his fist into Ventress's back. He felt flesh give and bone shatter, and Ventress's howled. He guessed he'd snapped a rib. Good. That would hurt, but probably not kill her.

"Now again," He continued, still calm. "You are going to tell me-"

"Never!" Ventress screamed at him. Christian made to hit her again, but suddenly, everything changed.

With a roar, Ventress pushed up, using the Force and her own upper-body strength to lift herself off the deck. Echo, trying to stay on, scrabbled for handholds, finally grabbing the Sith's cloak. Ventress dropped it (and Echo) with a simple flip of her wrist. She stood for a moment, panting. Christian stared at her. As he did, Ventress flexed her arms, and the one he'd thought broken snapped back into place with a loud _crack_. She reached up and re-adjusted her nose as well, snapping it back into it's proper spot. Apparently, it hadn't been broken after all. In the back of his mind, Christian recalled something Ahsoka had said earlier, about Ventress's species having evolved to fight. As she finished this, she retrieved her lightsabers and activated them. Christian could see rage flare through Ventress's unnatural eyes.

"Get back!" Ahsoka called, sprinting forward, her own lightsaber on. "I'll handle her! You-"

"No, you won't." Ventress growled. With a roar, she let fly with a massive Force push, which blasted everything in its path (Ahsoka included) halfway across the hanger, nearer to where her ship had crashed.

Well, everything except the six Spartans. The only ones who'd had to move were Christian, who stepped calmly out of the way of a chunk of debris, and Echo, who seemed slightly affected by the burst of Force energy, but not enough to do more than force her back several centimeters. The two moved Spartans stepped back to where they'd been.

"So, I guess we're going to have to do this the hard way." Christian muttered. Ventress grinned, crossing her lightsabers over her chest in and X pattern.

"Yes. And I'm going to enjoy it." She hissed. Christian sighed. He felt actual regret.

"Fine, hard way it is." Without hesitation, he tossed aside his captured guns and stood, hands akimbo.

"Spartans!" He howled to his team "Light 'em up!"

Around him, his team responded to his command instantly. Those that had picked up extra guns tossed those aside, and those that hadn't placed their weapons on their back. Four of the Spartans (Christian included) flexed their wrists in identical movements, ejecting twin ten-centimeter-wide and half-meter-long poles from compartments in their armor. These lit up with electricity, resembling the "humbler" stun prods used by bouncers and crowd control the UNSC over, but on a much more powerful, deadlier level. Shock rods, the Marines had nicknamed them.

The two Spartans who didn't join, Hester and Echo, pulled their own weapons; Hester removed her combat knife from its sheath and hit a stud on the handle, sending plasma through specific lines in the blade. Echo, who had shook of Ventress's cloak the moment if fell on her, ignited her Energy Sword with much flair. Ventress glanced around, before smiling again.

Christian held up his right hand, palm up. He flexed his fingers towards him; the universal _come here_ signal.

With a cry, Ventress charged.

* * *

Admiral Yularen was thrown bodily to the deck as the _Resolute_ took another barrage of fire from the Separatist ships. He raised himself up again, chest aching, and bellowed "Damage report!"

"We've lost most our forward shield!" One of the clone officers called out. "Turbolaser Turret Three is off-line as well! No hull breaches yet, but we've got fire in the hanger."

"And the other ships?" Yularen asked quietly. He half-feared what he might hear.

"The _Gualara_'s still in the fight," the clone replied. "but she's taken some heavy damage. Several of her turbolasers are offline. The _Emancipator..." _He paused, to check his screen. "She's dead in space. Looks like she caught the worst of that last ion cannon barrage."

"Is she still in one piece?"

"Yes, sir. Just floating dead. Other than that, she appears fine. Lights are still on in the bridges, and I'm getting energy fluctuation from her major systems. They must be trying to restart her."

Yularen let out a sight of relief. For now, his fleet was still in standing.

"And the enemy?" He asked.

A different officer replied this time. "They've lost about half their strength, sir. Four frigates are down, but we've still got another four and the command ship."

"Blast." Yularen muttered. His fleet had survived this far, but he wasn't sure how much more it could take. He needed something to finished this, but keep his ships intact. Well, relatively undamaged, as the case would be.

He found himself remembering the recent Battle of Ryloth. Specifically, the fight over it. Or what he remembered of it, as he'd been wounded in the opening conflict. His mind flicked back. Ahsoka had said something. A plan for a similar situation...

Then he remembered. His eyes opened wide. He had the solution.

"Prepare for an extreme maneuver!" He ordered. "Ready-"

"Sir, new ships joining the fight!" A third officer called out.

"What?" Yularen's head snapped to the officer's station. "Who are they?"

"It's the UNSC ships, sir. They're moving into position to attack the enemy."

"Get me contact with them, before they get themselves killed!" Yularen spun around and strode towards the holotable, just in time for it to blink to life.

"This is Admiral Wolff Yularen of the Grand Army of the Republic Navy," He said crisply, note even looking at the person he was addressing. "Whoever I am speaking to, I can assure you your help isn't required.

He paused, just long enough to see who he was talking to. He was only slightly surprised to see it was a woman.

His surprise turned to shock as she smiled, a most disturbing vision.

"Well, Admiral," She said quietly, "This is Captain Miranda Catherine Keyes of the United Nations Space Command, and your going to get our help, if you want it or not." She stopped, then turned around, obviously conversing with someone on her bridge.

"And from what I can see, you could use it."

"I assure you-" Yularen began, but the signal terminated. Keyes's image disappeared. He spun around, frustrated.

"Sir, their weapons are powering up!" The first clone officer reported.

"What kind of weapons could they have that-"

A brilliant light filled the Star Destroyer's viewports. It was so powerful that the transperisteel of them dimmed instantly to prevent the occupants from being blinded.

Yularen gazed in amazement at the cause of the light; a massive, rapidly expanding fireball that had blossomed into being in the middle of space.

"What was that?" He gasped. The clone's, having been stunned by the light, quickly snapped back to work.

"A nuclear device of some form, sir! And a big one; radiation readings are all over the scale."

"Nuclear?" Yularen muttered to himself. These people really _were_ primitive.

As quickly as it had appeared, the fireball died, lacking fuel and oxygen in the vacuum of space. But even though the blast was gone, it's effects were still being felt; a shudder ran through the Star Destroyer. Some of the screens on the bridge winked out, but nothing major happened.

_Electromagnetic pulse_, Yularen thought. He glanced down at the tactical screen, which was still on, then away. Did a double take. Blinked his eyes and rubbed them. Still didn't believe what he saw.

When he had last looked, there had been four frigates and the command ship. Now, two of the frigates were floating hulks, spitting atmosphere and debris. As he watched, eyes turned from the tactical display to the real thing, one became a second fireball as it's reactor overloaded. The second followed moments later, this time helped along by the UNSC ships; dozens, _hundreds_ of missiles of some form poured forth from the two, slamming into the crippled ship and detonating, breaking it apart into millions of chunks of slag.

But now the ships had gotten the attention of the Separatist commander. As Yularen watched, the two remaining frigates turned to engage the ships...

Leaving the command ship undefended.

In that moment, Yularen's respect of this "primitive" UNSC jumped several levels.

"Focus all fire on the command ship!" He ordered. "Those ships gave us a chance; let's not waste it!"

* * *

From her seat, Keyes watched the unfolding battle with content. Though she wouldn't admit it, she had worried that this battle would end up like the retaking of Harvest; a massive slaughter. And in a way, it had; except now the UNSC was playing the part of the Covenant, and the CIS the part of the UNSC.

It was Keyes who had ordered the Super Shiva nuke, one of ten that each of the _Spartan_-class ships carried, to be launched at the enemy, more as a test than an actual attack. A prod, to see how they would react, and to gauge the strength of their ships. She had not been expecting it to work so well; when the blast had cleared, two of the five remaining ships in the sky had been weakened, and one of them blew up seconds later. She'd quickly ordered a Crossbow missile barrage on the one that held together, and was rewarded by it exploding as well.

Now it seemed she had the CIS's attention. The two remaining frigates were breaking off their targets to engage her two ships. Keyes smiled.

"Arm the MAC's." She ordered her Weapons officer. "Load a heavy explosive round in the port, and a standard-triple in the starboard. Leave the center empty for now, and divert power from it to the port and starboard cannons."

"Yes ma'am." The Weapons officer relayed the commands to the loading systems. Meters above the bridge, machines sprung to life, sliding a several-thousand metric ton ferric tungsten slug, core filled to the brim with high explosives, into the port-side Super Triple MAC gun's chamber. On the starboard, identical machines loaded a trio of tungsten carbide-shelled, ferrous cored light rounds into the opposite weapon. The operation finished in seconds.

"Rounds loaded," The Weapons officer reported. "MAC charge is at one hundred percent. Ready to fire on your order.

"Ma'am, the _Arthur _is asking for orders," Juliet spoke from her pedestal.

"Tell them to guard our flank." She ordered. "Have them get a targeting solution on the command ship; the moment these frigates are out of the picture, we're going to hit that bastard at the same time."

"Sending...done."

"Now get us a solution for the closest frigate." Keyes continued. Her screens lit up with information, showing the solution.

"Solution locked." Juliet replied. "Ready to fire on your order."

"Wait..." Keyes muttered. "Wait..."

She watched her target to see if it would do anything unexpected. One heartbeat, two...

"Fire port MAC!" She roared.

A massive thunderclap shook the bridge. Brilliant light filled the viewports and Keyes viewscreens. The MAC round left the barrel at a one-fourth the speed of light, a glowing trail from the _Kelly _to its target.

The frigate didn't seem to notice the approaching slug. It continued forward, and in consequence took the round straight on.

Its shields shimmered for a moment, then failed under the incredible pressure of the super-fast metal projectile. The shields failed quickly enough that the round passed through intact. The hull of the frigate offered more resistance, however, and the round finally broke. As it did, the mass of explosives packed into it detonated.

For a moment, a second sun blossomed on the frigate's bow. When it was gone, so was most of the ship's bow. The remains drifted, all internal control lost. Which was when the laws of physics took over.

In addition to causing a massive amount of damage to the frigate, the MAC round had transferred most of it's incredible momentum into the frigate; this was still present, even after the round itself exploded. Slowly, the destroyed ship floated, closing with the other frigate. The still moving ship seemed not to notice it's destroyed ally. It continued forward, approaching the UNSC ships, until the floating hulk slammed into it's port side. Explosions erupted along both ships. Debris hurtled in all directions. The intact ship (now no longer so intact) attempted to pull away from the hulk it had collided with, but failed. Keyes, using the magnification from her ship's external cameras, saw something that pleased her immensely; the crash had been severe enough to effectively lock the ships together, twisted metal fusing them into one.

Keyes actually laughed. This was better than she'd been planning. She'd intended the heavy round to knock out her target's shields, and the triple rounds to finish them off, but now she could destroy both with it instead.

And so she did, hesitating only long enough to order the port MAC loaded with another triple shot. Better safe than sorry.

"Double MAC Shot, on my mark." She told her Weapons officer. The woman glanced at her, curiosity on her face. Then it cleared, and she relayed the order.

Her confusion was understandable; the Weapons officer (and most of the officers on the bridges, Keyes included) had been trained with older UNSC ships. On them, firing both MAC guns simultaneously was something that never happened, mostly because most ships had only one, and the ones that had two or more (like the destroyer class) couldn't spare the power to do it. And doing so would leave them without any means of defense if the MAC's failed.

But the _Kelly_ wasn't an older UNSC ship. It had not two, but _three_ MAC guns, and more than enough power to fire all three together.

Where this power came from was something unique to the _Spartan_-class. Towards the end of the Human-Covenant War, UNSC scientists had perfected an advanced form of fusion reactor, known as the Triple Reactor, which consisted of a large, central reactor boosted by a pair of smaller ones. When all was working, this contraption could be boosted to provide three hundred percent power, using laser-induced optical slurry's of ions, chilled to almost-absolute zero to cool it. A single one of these had been installed on the famous _Pillar of Autumn_, and the device had proved its use during the Battle of Reach, allowing the Halcyon-class ship to knock out several Covenant ships, including an Assault Carrier, before being almost irreparably damaged by that last ship.

Most of UNSC ships now had one. But the each ship of the _Spartan_-class had _four_ of them, with normal configuration being the first two powered the engines, and the second giving juice to shields, weapons and other essential systems. This could be changed, however, to just about any combination the ship's commanding officer could want. Including the possibility of adding another two Triple Reactors, or adding more smaller reactors to each larger Triple for more power.

And so, seconds after Keyes gave the order, the port and starboard MAC guns roared in unison, spitting six light rounds at the entangled ships. This time, the still-active ship tried to evade them, having seen the damage done to their sister ship, but the obstruction of said ship slowed it down. All six rounds impacted, one after another, and both ships shuddered. Secondary explosions chained along their length again, before a massive final explosion, the twin ship's reactors finally going critical, blew both into a miniature asteroid field.

"Targets destroyed, Captain." The Weapons officer said quietly. She looked shocked. The bridge echoed her feelings. For a full minute, no one said anything. Nothing moved.

Then the officers on board exploded in cheers and whoops, shaking their fists in the air and slapping their stations and shouting curse-filled insults at the remains of the CIS ships. Keyes sat back and let them celebrate. Their morale needed to be high right now.

But she knew the fight wasn't over.

* * *

The hanger of the disabled CIS frigate filled with the sounds of advanced melee combat. The _hummm_ of lightsabers, the _buzz_ of shock rods, and the grunts and cries of their wielders.

Currently, Ventress was simultaneously fighting Christian, Hester and Matt. Coraline and Kelly circled like sharks, ready to join the fray. From a few meters away, behind the remains of Ventress's ship, Spartan Echo-419 watched silently, waiting for the time to strike.

And silently didn't just refer to the fact that she couldn't speak. She was quite literally silent, making no noise or movement as she waited for the Sith to make an opening for her.

Her hand tightened on her Energy Sword. It's grip was warm, filled with power. Echo wanted nothing better than to drive it between Ventress's legs and slide it up, cut the alien freak completely in half.

But Ventress was an impressive swordsman; she was holding her own against three Spartans, blades whirling to stop shock rod and plasma-filled combat knife.

_Come on you, dick-licking xeno bitch, _she thought angrily. _Slip up..._

And, as if in answer to her thought, Ventress did. She crossed her lightsabers, blocking the three Spartan's fighting her. And leaving her back exposed.

In that moment, Echo moved.

She sprinted clear of her cover, accelerating towards Ventress's back as fast as her augmented muscles could push her. In the space between them, things flashed up in Echo's mind; memories, the same ones that appeared to her every time she fought against an alien. A house, on fire. Running with fear in her veins. Dirt under her hands, pain in her knees. Sliding and falling against cold metal, purple in color, only stopped by a massive furry hand on her back. Putrid saliva in her face. Hiding and crying. More running. A cry of triumph, mixed with one of anger, and slamming her tiny fist against a large holographic button. A roar of venting air. An ice-cold shard of metal in her fingers.

Then she was at Ventress's back, and her mind focused on it instead.

She could see it was bare, the Sith having shed her cloak to drop Echo when she'd risen from the floor. Echo analyzed it in the seconds she had; pale, lean, muscled in places, and not heavily scarred. All in all, an attractive back. At least, that would be the opinion of someone who got turned on by aliens.

Echo wasn't. And she certainly didn't like the back. Or the person it belonged to. She decided to make it more pleasing to her eyes by jamming her Sword through it.

Echo drew her hand back, swung with force. The blade moved true; another second, and Ventress would be history.

Ironically, it was the UNSC that saved the Sith. At the exact moment Echo was about to strike the Rattataki, the blast wave from the two detonating frigates reached the disabled one. Unslowed by anything in the vacuum of space, it hit the ship with full force. The whole wreck shook like it was going to come apart. Echo and the other Spartans were thrown off balance, as was Ventress, who, seeing a chance to escape, reached up with her hands. The ceiling of the hanger trembled, and sections collapsed. Ventress hurled these at the Spartans, who dodged them easily. But it slowed them down enough that Ventress could get space between them. She paused, stared at the Spartans, breathing heavily. Christian flexed his neck, making it crack in the way that always made Echo's chest warm delightfully.

"Impressive." Ventress hissed. "You're fighting skills are surprisingly advanced...for primitives."

"So are yours." Christian replied. "For a wannabe Sith."

Ventress glared at Christian, then charged, sabers swinging. Christian raised his rods to block them, but Alpha got them first, Hester and Matt blocked her left one, while Coraline and Kelly (who had started guarding the still stunned Ahsoka when the battle paused) stopped her right. Ventress screamed at them, but was cut off as Christian, seeing an opening, drove his right gauntlet into her gut. The shock rod on it compacted into itself with the force of the blow, activating and adding several dozen volts of electricity to the already-devastating force of Christian's armored fist. Ventress screamed, long and loud, until the Spartan struck her with an uppercut to the jaw that sent her flying back, stray arcs of electricity flowing over her body. She landed with a loud _thud_, and stayed down. Christian strode over to her.

"You're finished." He spat. "Stand down, or I'll make you."

"I'm not...finished yet, scum." Ventress gasped. Echo started laughing (or trying to). She couldn't help it. The alien's level of denial was entertaining. Ventress's blue eyes focused on her. Echo noticed, and raised her middle finger to her.

This seemed to be the last straw for the alien. She motioned with her hands, clenching it into a fist.

Echo started laughing again, until what felt like a steel fist closed around her throat. For a moment, she didn't feel fear. Just frustrated. She reached up to her neck, intending to snap whatever was around it and add it to her collection of trophies.

But her fingers touched empty air. Nothing was grabbing her, but she was still choking.

Something clicked in Echo's mind; Something that Ahsoka had said during the quick briefing;

_Ventress is a Sith. Or at least trying to become one. Because of this_, _she can use her Force connection to harm people. I don't know much of what she can do, but I know she likes to use it to choke her enemies. If she does this, you need to break her concentration._

Echo glanced down at her hand; It still held her Energy Sword.

Without hesitation, she reached her arm back and tossed it.

Ventress saw it coming, but didn't have time to do much about it. Echo's throw had been with the force of desperation. In the time she had, Ventress dodged the soaring blade and, grabbing one of her lightsabers from the floor with the Force, ran towards the closest door. Echo dropped like a rock, impacting the deck with a clang. She coughed, rubbed her sore neck, and tried to stand. Found she couldn't. Her armor had locked up, sensing her lack of respiration. Lay back down with a groan.

_Fuck_, she thought. _So much for adding her head to my collection._

She noticed something on the deck near her; Ventress's other lightsaber. Gingerly, she reached out and grabbed.

_This will do,_ She decided, sliding it into a pouch on her armor.

She glanced up to check on the rest of Alpha. They were in motion, Christian shouting orders.

"Hester, Matt, thorough that door to the left!" He bellowed. "Coraline, Kelly, take that other door, try to cut her off!"

"Yes sir!" Hester replied. She and Matt sprinted in the direction of Ventress's escape. Coraline paused.

"Wait, what about you?" She asked.

"I'll catch up. I'm gonna check on Echo. Then I'm gonna go right behind that bitch. We catch her in a three-way." Replied Christian. Coraline nodded and exited the hanger. Christian watched them, before turning and walking to where Echo lay on the deck. He kneeled down, depolarizing his faceplate. Echo noticed his blue eyes, normally so hard, had concern in them.

"You alright?" He asked softly. Echo nodded.

_I'll live,_ She signed. _Armor's locked up. Can't move. _

"That's fine. I've got a new objective for you."

_But you need-_

"No, we don't. Not that badly." Christian glanced over Echo's shoulder. "Besides, this is more important." He reached down to the deck and picked something up; as he returned, Echo realized it was her Energy Sword. She took it from him gladly.

"I need you to keep an eye on Ahsoka. I don't want her coming from behind and taking us out. When she wakes up, if she tries something-"

_I'll take her down and rape whatever her species has as an equivalent of a slit with my Sword._

"Just what I was thinking." Christian smiled, patted Echo's shoulder, then re-polarized his faceplate. "We'll come back as soon as we finish."

_Leave Ventress alive if you can. I want the pleasure of ripping her fucking head off myself._

Christian cracked his knuckles, then pulled his Battle Rifle free of his back.

"Don't worry, Echo." He said. "You'll get to do _so_ much more than that."

Both Spartan's laughed (or Echo tried to, but ended up coughing). Christian jogged off after his team, and Echo gripped her Energy Sword. She looked over at Ahsoka's still form. She didn't look like she was getting up any time soon.

Secretly, Echo hoped she did.

* * *

Christian pounded down the hallway, Battle Rifle swinging in his arms. Up ahead, his Motion Tracker painted yellow and red dots.

Too his left and right, the fours soldiers of his team. Before him, the single red dot, hopefully Ventress. They were close, as close as Christian hoped the end of this whole mission was. Still, even with victory in his grasp, he felt a pang of guilt.

The thing he'd told Echo about how she needed to watch Ahsoka was mostly a lie. It wasn't that he trusted the alien girl (he didn't). He was worried Ventress would repeat her actions in the hanger again.

During their briefing and planning session, Ahsoka had given them a quick run-down on the thing that made such events possible, something she'd called "The Force." How it worked, the things possible with it, stuff in that line of thought. How it "surrounds and penetrates and binds everything in the universe" (which lead to some sniggering from Alpha, especially when she said _penetrates_).

But quietly, to Christian, she'd explained part of the reason she thought their desperate plan would actually work; for some reason, Christian and his Spartans seemed cut off from the Force. It didn't seem to effect them (as Ahsoka showed when she tried, and failed, to move Christian with her mind earlier during the session), and they weren't sensible through it. All of them...except Echo.

This was, Ahsoka explained, probably the reason she could hear the silent Spartan's thoughts; she wasn't so much reading her mind (which was something only "Dark Side" Force users, like Ventress, could do, and they couldn't do it passively), as sensing what she was trying to say through the girl's latent Force sensitivity. UNSC scientists would later find that part of the reason also had to due with Echo's muteness. When someone is born mute, it is usually something related to the body rather than the brain that causes it. The sections of the brain that control speech still work, and in fact usually showed more use than those in people who could speak. Testing would show that Echo's brain had some of the highest activity ever recorded.

Basically put, mute people effectively thought louder. Coupled with her connection to the Force (however slightly), Echo was basically broadcasting what was on her mind like a radio tower. Ahsoka, and anyone else with Force sensitivity, had the right equipment to pick these thoughts up.

But this same thing meant that what had happened in the hanger could happen again. Echo had been lucky to have her Energy Sword with her. Had the situation been different...

Christian shook his head. He needed to focus. He glanced ahead, up the hallway he was running along. With his augmented eyes, he could just see the retreating back of Ventress. Good. He was going the right way.

Christian threw himself into a sprint, stride lengthening into a graceful gallop. The walls around him started to blur as he picked up speed. Ventress looked closer. Christian put on more speed.

Then he was behind her, easily keeping pace. If she knew he was there, she didn't react. Christian glanced at his Motion Tracker. The other four Spartans were closing, but not fast enough. Ventress had started to slow; where ever she wanted to go, she'd arrived.

Without hesitating, Christian leaped.

He collided with Ventress's back, and both tumbled to the floor. Ventress rolled, shaking Christian off her, but not before Alpha Team's leader slammed his fist into the rib he'd broken earlier. Ventress stalled as pain lanced through her. Sith and Spartan crashed to the deck, beginning to rise simultaneously. Christian moved faster. In a single smooth burst, he put his foot directly between Ventress's breasts, pushed her down to the floor, and aimed his Battle Rifle at her head. Around him, the rest of Alpha showed up. They stood around the two combatants, weapons at ease but not holstered. Under his helmet, Christian grinned.

"Any last words?" He asked coldly, clicking the safety off. To his surprise, Ventress smiled.

"Yes," She said. She raised her arms, grasping her left with her right. "Die." She whispered.

She squeezed her wrist. Christian, after a moments confusion, realized it wasn't her wrist; it was the bracelet she was wearing. It had dozens of buttons on it, small to blend in with the metal but there none the less. The one she'd hit was flashing.

Seconds passed. No one moved, unsure of what to do.

They were startled out of this stupor by the sudden, violent rumble that ran through the ship. So hard was this shudder that the Spartan's were thrown off their feet. Something exploded overhead, showering the area with a light dusting of debris. Behind the Spartans, sections of the wall opened upward, huge circular hatches unsealing from the wall with hisses. Green lights glowed next to several, and Ventress, now freed of Christian's hold, dived into one of these. Kelly and Matt, the two closest to it, attempted to follow her, but the hatch re-sealed itself in their faces. There was a loud bang and a swishing roar, and the light blinked to red. Seconds later, the rest of the hatches closed, and similar sounds echoed through the hall.

The Spartan's exchanged glances. No one wanted to say what was on their minds. Finally, Christian voiced it for them all;

"Fuck." He spat. The rest of Alpha agreed.

They probably would have stood there for a bit, stewing in their anger and frustration, had not another massive blast shook the ship. The Spartan's stumbled again.

"Penny, are you still there?" Christian howled into his COM.

"Affirmative." Replied the AI. "What the hell is going in there?"

"I was hoping you could tell me!" Christian retorted. Penny grunted, and went silent, obviously searching for answers.

"Got it," She said finally. "It's nothing fancy, just a self-destruct."

"_Just _a self-destruct?" Matt added, shocked. "There's no _just_ about that!"  
"There is when I can stop it." Penny said, sounding pleased with herself.

"Then do it!" Christian shouted. Penny went silent again, and the ship stopped shuddering.

"There." Penny said pleasantly. "Now we can-"

The rest of Penny's sentence was cut off in a burst of static. Another rumble filled the ship, much stronger than before. Within moments, the whole ship was shaking like the buildings of the United Republic of North American city of Downtown Seattle during the First Great Quake, back in the 21st century.

"What the fuck?" Coraline howled. "I thought you said you stopped this!"

"I did!" Penny replied, fear in her voice. "This isn't the destruct! I'm not-Oh no."

"What?" Christian asked, fear gripping his innards in a vice.

"The engines, they've must've been damaged! I'm getting massive radiation spikes everywhere!"

"Penny, what exactly is going on?"

"It's a wildcat destabilization! The self-destruct must have sent the engines over the edge!" The AI cried. "Everything's melting down, this whole thing is gonna blow sky high! I can't stop it!"

"Doesn't matter, don't try to. We don't give a shit about this ship. We got what we needed." Christian barked tensely. "Right now, I want you to find us a way off this thing before those engines go off!"

"Right, sure...okay, got it. The escape pods are no good, looks like our bald friend launched them all. But the hanger is still open..."

"We're heading back there now. Is that exfil Pelican still ready?"

"Yes. The pilot's getting antsy."

"Well, if she wants to come pick us up, now would be a great time!"

"On it."

"And the moment you're done, load yourself into my armor. You've done what we needed. That, and I'd rather not leave you behind."

"With pleasure." Penny switched COM channels, contacting the pilot. Christian turned to his team.

"Lets get the hell out of here, before we get fried!" He shouted. Seconds after he finished, he felt the cold and pain of Penny storing herself in his armor. With his team behind him and AI in his head, they headed back towards the hanger.

* * *

Anakin ran, breath rasping in his throat. Behind him, Rex and the clones barely kept pace. They'd been running around the frigate for quite a while now. Anakin had lost track of time, so he couldn't say for how long exactly. The tracking signal in Ahsoka's comlink was strong, so they had a basic direction, but the problem was that they kept running into locked doors and stalled elevators and the like. Secretly, Anakin thought the ship was purposely trying to stop them.

But the long succession of impediments seemed to have finally stopped; Anakin could see the signal's origin. He put on a burst of speed, matched by the clones, and quickly found himself in the large open space of the hanger. He scanned it, visually and with the Force, noticing what looked like a crashed _Ginivex_-class ship as he did. In seconds, he picked up Ahsoka's Force signature. Moments later, he saw her body, on the deck near the remains of the crashed ship. Anakin turned to Kix.

"Get over there and check her out." He ordered. "The rest of you, come with me."

He led the remaining clones through the hanger, taking time to check out the many destroyed droids on the deck.

"What the hell happened here?" Rex wondered out loud. Anakin reached down and picked up a droid head, separated from it's body. It had a large hole in it, one caused by a blaster bolt. Anakin tossed it aside.

"Looks like some of our friends from the bridge managed to get their hands on some enemy weapons." Waxer noted from behind him, echoing Anakin's own thoughts. "Looks like they must've greased a whole platoon."

"That wasn't the only thing." Hardcase added, pointing to something on the floor. Anakin joined him, followed by Rex. The clone indicated something below them, a long burn mark through the deck.

"That's a lightsaber burn." Anakin declared. Hardcase nodded.

"That was my thought, sir." Hardcase fingered the gouge, then rose. "Looks to me like they ran into Ventress before we did."

From near the destroyed ship, Echo and Fives joined the conversation.

"Sir, we found someone!" Fives informed. Anakin hurried over. The two clones were standing on the opposite side of the ship (which Anakin could now see was obviously a _Ginivex_), forcing the Jedi to go around.

The person on the other side turned out to be one of the soldiers from the bridge. Anakin instinctively reached for his lightsaber, but relaxed when he noticed that the green-armored form was still.

"Is it alive?" He asked hesitantly. The clones exchanged looks, but were saved the trouble of answering when the soldier shifted, sliding down onto the deck. What was unmistakably a snore emerged from it's helmet.

"Guess that answers that." Hardcase said plainly. From behind the group came a shuffling noise. All present turned to see Ahsoka, helped along by Kix, approaching.

"Huh." She grunted, seeing the sleeping soldier. "So even the mighty Echo needs to sleep like every other being."

"Uh, I'm not asleep, sir." Echo said, addressing Ahsoka.

"No, not you." Ahsoka dismissed Echo quickly. "Her." She pointed at the soldier, who shifted. "Her name's Echo, too. SPARTAN-419."

"Spartan?" Everyone else, (excluding Anakin) queried.

"I'll explain later." Ahsoka shook Kix off, then kneeled down before the Spartan. She laughed softly. "I have to say, she looks kinda peaceful when she's asleep."

To Anakin's surprise, a response echoed through his mind.

_I'm not asleep, you stupid cunt. _It said.

Anakin whirled, looking for the origin. Ahsoka tapped him on the shoulder, and pointed to the now-not-so-still form of the Spartan. She was rising from the floor, propping herself up on her slugthrower.

"Well then," Ahsoka said. "Echo, I'd like you to meet my Master, General Anakin Skywalker." She turned and continued, this time to Anakin. "Master, this is Echo-419."

_He's quite a bit older than I though he was. _Echo noted. _So pedophilia transcends the barrier of space, apparently. _

Anakin and Ahsoka shared a look.

"What, is she going to say anything?" Hardcase asked.

"I don't think she can." Kix noted quietly. In response, the Spartan moved her hand in sign language.

_Got that right, plastic boy._ She "said".

"And these are Kix, Hardcase and Echo." Ahsoka continued, gesturing towards the clones.

_Nice to meet you._ The Spartan signed. _And I see one of you shares my name. Hope you can live up to it._

"Uh..." Replied the clone. "I hope so to."

_Also, I think it might be a good idea to refer to me by my tag instead of my name for now. Just to avoid confusion._

"What's your tag?"

_419. It's on my shoulder, see?_

"Ah. Okay then, 419 it is."

Anakin, tired of this, walked in front of Ahsoka and glared down at the girl.

"So, where the rest of your team?"

419 looked up at him calmly.

_Hunting Ventress. We fucked her over good, and she's running like a pussy._

"And you're here why?"

_Keeping an eye on Red here. _She pointed at Ahsoka._ Master Chief's orders. _

"Which way did your team go?"

419 gestured again, towards one of the door. Anakin started for it, but stopped. The deck beneath his feet trembled.

"What the heck was that?" Echo asked. No one got to answer, as they were all off their feet by a much larger shiver, powerful enough to knock several chunks of the ceiling loose and the lights to flicker. 419 rose with inhuman quickness, bending down on one knee and gazing down the iron sites of her slugthrower.

_This is _not _good, _She said. _I hope Ventress didn't do anything retarded and get herself killed._

"Well, at least we agree on something." Anakin muttered. "We need her alive. She needs to stand trial for her crimes."

_What? Hell no! I want her alive so I can kill her with my bare hands. And maybe desecrate her corpse. Unless Christian called dibs again._

"Never mind." Anakin said, feeling slightly sick. He wanted to chew 419 out, but he didn't have the time. That, and she wasn't one of his men.

From the passage ahead of him came the sound of pounding metal-sheathed feet. From it burst the rest of 419's team. In the instant that both forces made contact again, there was a repeat of the situation on the bridge; silence and weapons drawn. But this time it was broken up before it could really develop; Anakin, having guessed there was some kind of truce going on, ordered his men to lower their blasters with a wave of his hands. His opposite number (Christian) did the same with his own men.

"Good, you're on your feet." He said, addressing 419. "We need to get the hell out of here. _Now_."

"Wait, what's going on?" Anakin asked.

"Oh, nothing." One of the female Spartan's (with the number 011 on her shoulder) said sarcastically. "Just the fact that THE ENGINES ARE GOING WILDCAT AND ARE GOING TO BAKE EVERYTHING IN A THREE KLICK RADIUS AT ALMOST 100 MILLION DEGREES!"

"Oh Sith." Ahsoka whispered. Anakin set his mouth in a grim line. Technically, his team shouldn't leave yet. They hadn't completed their mission.

Then he thought, _wait, what mission?_

He activated his comlink, signaling the pilot of the gunship that had brought them here.

"Hawk, you reading?"

"I'm here, sir." The clone pilot replied. "What do you need?"

"Pickup from the port hanger. And make it fast. The frigates reactors are going critical; I'd rather not be here when they finally fail."

"Roger that, boss." Hawk agreed. "Making best speed. ETA one minute."

"We'll be waiting." Anakin closed down the link and focused on the Spartans. "You might want to call for your own ride." He said simply. "I doubt the gunship can take all of us."

"Already did." Christian said, just as simply. He turned and pointed into the darkness of space. "That's it right there."

Sure enough, as Anakin looked, he could just make out the glow of engines. He tried to make out the shape of their owner, but before he could, the distinctive warble of gunship repulserlifts reached his ears. With a burst of displaced air, Hawk's gunship soared through the containment field keeping the vacuum out and the air in and soared to a stop before the clones and Jedi. The hatches on the side sprung open, and Anakin lead the charge inside. Before the ship lifted off, he called out to Christian

"We've got some talking to do." He said. The Spartan nodded.

"We'll do it after we escape this floating death trap." He replied. "Call us. You're Admiral has the freq."

Anakin nodded in reply, and then lost sight of the soldier as the blast shields shut.

The gunship roared free of the frigate. Anakin glanced at the small viewscreen that was connected to an external camera to check their progress. The frigate was far behind, but not far enough. As if to prove his statement, a massive plume of fire erupted from the rear of the hulk.

"Sir, that was a bit too close for comfort," Hawk said, voice still calm despite the danger. "Permission to push this bird to the red line?"

"You don't even need to ask, Hawk. Do what you need."

"Understood, sir."

The cabin of the gunship rocked as Hawk accelerated. Anakin was forced to grab the overhead straps to stay upright. A worrying vibration came from the floor, but Anakin brushed it off. Hawk was a good pilot; he'd fought with him at Christophsis and Teth. He knew just how much his ship could take.

Another burst of fire from the frigates engines. Anakin noticed Ahsoka looking intensely at the screen.

"Lets hope they get out..." She muttered.

"They will." Anakin assured her.

Though truthfully, he wasn't so sure.

* * *

"Boss, Pelican's inbound!" Matt called to Christian. "ETA 30 seconds!"

"Right, get ready!" Christian shouted, slipping his Battle Rifle onto his back. "Sling your gear. We're making a rush-boarding."

A massive explosion shook the hanger. Debris flew in all directions.

"If were lucky." Christian muttered to himself.

"Hey boyo, you don't need luck," A new voice spoke from Christian's COM. Female, cocky, and bearing the accent of the long-dead United Kingdom of Earth. "You've got me."

Christian recognized the voice. Under his helmet, he smiled grimly. He knew this pilot all to well; Warrant Officer Rita Green was her name, of the 23rd Naval Air Squadron. But she was better known by her call sign;

"Singe." He said. "Only you would be crazy enough to take this job."

"So you do remember me." Singe said. Christian laughed, darkly.

"Funny, that's the second time someone's told me that today." He explained.

"Tell me later. Right now, we need to get the bloody hell out of here before we get roasted."

"Ready when you are."

Christian looked out into space. He could easily make out the dropship, lit up against the blackness of space by the plume of light from the ship's overloading engines. Another joined it, and for a moment, Christian lost sight of Singe's ship, but it showed up again seconds later, easily dodging the burst of fire. Swooping down and performing a roll, the Pelican entered the hanger with a roar of jets activating, intakes on the engines opening to suck in now-present air. Even now, with danger and death so close, Christian couldn't help but notice the custom paint job on the bird; flames, reaching backwards to the wings, painted char patches along the body, and a stylized picture of a rather-stacked ginger-haired, blue-eyed and freckled girl in nothing but the leg braces and boots of a set of Human-Covenant War -era Marine Corps M52B armor, waving her hand at her sweating face on the port side of the nose, just below the cockpit.

Before he could see anything more, the dropship swung around, the back hatch, better known rather grimly but accurately as the "blood tray" opening as it did. Even before it was fully deployed, Christian was sprinting towards it.

"Everyone mount up!" He howled as he climbed into the troop bay. "Come on, we don't have all day!"

The rest of Alpha Team quickly jumped aboard. It rose, and the blood tray began to close. Through the space above it, Christian could see a wave of fire coming down one of the hallways leading too the engines.

Coraline noticed it too. "Don't bother with the tray!" She shouted to Singe. "Just punch it!"

"Aye aye, ma'am." Singe responded calmly. The Pelican's engines roared as she dumped fuel into them, and the hanger shrank quickly.

"Strap yourselves in, this it gonna be rough!" Christian ordered his team. The Spartans under his command quickly secured themselves with the restraints in their seats without question.

The reason why proved itself moments later. As the dropship left the hanger, the atmosphere in the troop bay was exposed to hard vacuum, and, following the laws of physics, vented.

Actually, this was in some ways a good thing. The sudden burst of air rushing into space added several extra badly-needed pounds of thrust to those being produced by the dropship's engines.

Unfortunately, it also sucked everything lose in the troop bay out into space;

Including Christian.

Worried about his team's safety, the leader of Alpha Team had forgotten to do up his own restraints.

The first notice Christian got to this mistake was when, as they left the atmosphere of the hanger, he was violently yanked off his feet and hurled the length of the bay towards the still-open blood tray.

For the first time in the entire mission, fear overcame the Spartan-IV. As he shot towards empty space, he screamed unintelligently and started waving his arms, sending him tumbling. Felt fingers touch metal, tried to grab it, failed, continued out into space. He shot clear of the back of the Pelican feet-first, saw the magnetic clamps along the underside of the Pelican's tail, the thrust wash from the engines on the back, the strangely beautiful light show that he realized was a space battle...

And came to a bone-jarring stop. Something snagged his left arm. He wavered for a moment in the wake of the escaping air. He saw his other arm, waving wildly. He stilled it, then reached up and grabbed what was holding him safe.

Christian glanced up. "Above" him, Hester reached out of the bay to grab his arm with both of hers, floating in zero gravity, held in place by Echo, who in turn was gripping the seat and Hester's foot.

"Nice." Penny noted.

"Shit." Christian said, exhaling. He turned to face Hester. "Thanks."

"No problems, sir." Replied his savior.

Hester hauled Christian into his seat, the blood tray closing after them. The troop bay re-pressurized quickly, and the moment he could Christian stood up again and opened the door to the cockpit.

"Nice move, Spartan." Singe remarked from the pilot seat. "Though I might recommend you put on a T-Pack or M-SPEC re-entry unit before you try space dancing again."

Christian grunted and slid into the empty co-pilots chair (Singe always flew solo) with a groan. He might have been a Spartan, but he was still tired.

"Just get us the fuck out of here." He sighed. Singe grinned broadly, brilliant white teeth matching her pale skin almost perfectly.

"Aye-" She started, but stopped as she glanced down at her instruments "Oh bullocks! Look at that!"

"What?" Christian almost jumped out of his seat. Singe pointed out the cockpit window. Christian looked...and felt his jaw drop.

"Woah." He muttered.

Before him was the space battle he'd seen earlier during his impromptu space walk. But now he could see it in it's full glory.

Christian felt Penny flow out of his mind. She appeared on the Pelican's holotank in a burst of holographic sparks.

"Pretty impressive, isn't it?" She said, arms crossed.

"Yeah." Christian muttered softly, almost completely mesmerized by the ships trading fire across space. In his HUD, relevant information burst into being beside every ship. Christian glanced at Penny.

"Thanks." He said. The AI beamed.

"You're welcome." She said chirpily. Christian turned back to the battle.

Currently, there were three distinct groups; to the "left" of the fight were the three Republic ships (tagged as Star Destroyers), two of which were actually firing. The third seemed dead in space, simply drifting. As Christian watched, the small white dot that was the gunship Anakin had used to escape the doomed frigate docked with the leading ship. Their target was the a truly bizarre looking ship, identified as a _Lucrehulk_-class, which was returning fire. To the right of that vessel were the UNSC Supercrusiers (the Pelican's final destination), which were currently staying out of the fight. Christian nodded in silent observation of Captain Keyes tactical thinking; she was probably waiting for the other two groups to blow the crap out of each other, then finish the job.

In moments he was proved right. With matching flairs of light, the _Kelly _and the _Arthur_'s MAC guns fired, spewing slug at the _Lucrehulk_. The ship attempted to maneuver away from them, but compared to the speed of the MAC slugs, it may as well have been standing still. All rounds hit the target, and the ship slewed sideways as their momentum transferred into it. Explosions ran along it's length, and a large part of the port "arm" sheered off, venting atmosphere and chunks of itself. Every other ship around it (UNSC and Republic) closed in for the kill.

Several thousand kilometers off the stern of the enemy ship, space seemed to warp. Ships appeared, snapping back into normal space from what Penny informed Christian was know to the Republic and CIS as "hyperspace".

The enemy had seemingly held these ships back, as reserves. More frigates, from the looks of them. Another eight or so.

The new arrivals moved into attack position, opening fire on the Republic ships (which were closer to their point of appearance), turning their sides to the UNSC Supercrusiers. From these sides rose clouds of strange ships.

"Oh shit." Penny murmured. "Vulture droids."  
"What?"

"Robot starfighters. They aren't that smart, but they can out-maneuver just about anything with a living pilot. And they pack quite a punch."

"Better warn the Captain." Christian noted. Penny smiled, slightly.

"Already did."

"Good." Christian turned back to the battle. He scanned the flight of Vulture droids. As he did, he saw a difference in size between several. "Penny, what the hell are those larger ones?"

"Larger-" Penny stopped short, data flashing over her form. "Oh _fuck_. They've sent in Hyenas too! They're bombers, basically." She continued, answering her friend's unasked question.  
"Let me guess; you've already told the Captain."

"Damn straight."

The cloud of Vultures and Hyenas accelerated towards the UNSC ships. They flew straight, not dodging or anything, simply running hard towards their targets.

The pilots of the Advanced Longsword and Cutlass fighters decided they didn't like this, and, almost as one, flew to engage.

The distance between the two forces closed rapidly. The droids held their fire, waiting for the enemy ships to come into range.

The UNSC fighters didn't. High-caliber slugs, Nonlinear Cannon beams, plasma rounds, and missiles of all sorts lit up the black backdrop of the fight. Explosions blossomed throughout the droid cloud, both from direct hits and collisions with the resulting debris.

In moments, almost half the droid force vaporized. But the other half was still there, and armed. Finally, they opened fire, raining red beams of light upon the UNSC single ships, which pulled away in evasive maneuvers.

Some made it, some didn't.

Christian grit his teeth and clenched his fist as several friendly ships took hits. Most kept flying, but some spiraled out of control, their pilots ejecting if able.

Then the two forces were past each other. The UNSC fighters began a slow, wide turn back towards their opponents, but held their fire once they got a bead on them; now, any shot that missed might hit one of their own ships. The droids pushed on, Vultures moving back to cover the Hyenas.

Beams of light lanced from the Supercrusiers, pulse lasers reaching brilliant destruction across vacuum.

Again, explosions chained through the droid assembly. Several droids, disabled by the pulse lasers radiation but still whole, spiraled into oblivion.

But still the survivors came.

The Supercrusiers moved farther apart, forcing the droids to choose between one or the other, and hopefully splitting the attacking force. It worked. The surviving droids divided roughly in half, each going after one of the ships. Seconds later, the bombers soared ahead, and unleashed their payloads.

Glowing bombs impacted the UNSC capital ships, exploding silently.

The _Arthur _took the attack without a problem; its shields took the worst of the blasts, and it answered with it's Helix II autocannons, spewing a literal wave of lead and tungsten into space. The few droids that had survived the earlier gauntlet of defenses to attack it simply vanished.

The _Kelly _wasn't so lucky. It had gotten the majority of the bombers, and took the brunt of their bombs. But it's shield's held...barely.

Then a group of Vulture droids, apparently damaged, slammed into the ship's superstructure.

The shields failed. And the next wave of bombs slammed into bare hull. Smoke and debris formed a small cloud around the impact points.

"Shit!" Christian howled, rising to his feet in rage, fists clenched.

"Bloody 'ell!" Singe bellowed, swinging the dropship sideways to avoid the remains of a Vulture droid. Both looked on it helplessness, hoping what they believed had happened wasn't true.

It wasn't. As the Vultures and Hyena's flew around for another pass, the damaged Supercrusier turned to face them. Its pulse lasers and autocannons roared, as if in anger for the damage done. The droid flight attempted to avoid, but failed. In seconds, nothing was left but floating scrap.

Christian and Singe each let out a sigh of relief.

"That was a close one." The Pelican pilot said. "I thought she was a goner for a moment there."

"You and me both." Replied the Spartan.

"Thank god they made Titanium-A honeycombing a standard procedure on most ships after the war, right?" Penny added. Both Singe and Christian nodded, the former grinning broadly. Penny decided not to comment on their reactions; in most of the battles that the two had fought in, a UNSC ship taking a hit meant it was down. The reaction was so ingrained, not only in the Spartan and the pilot, but in the minds of practically every man and woman in the UNSC, that it would probably take years for them to get used to the new order of things.

"Let's just hope it holds up to what's coming next." Singe said, voice falling dark. Christian twisted around to the left get a view of what she was talking about.

What she was talking about was the CIS frigates; they'd apparently finished with the Republic ships (all of which were now floating, disabled) and were turning to the Supercrusiers.

Christian studied the odds. He put them at somewhere between really not good and horrible. He glanced over at Singe, who guessed what he was going to ask.

"I'm going dark," She told the other five Spartan's in the back. "Shut down anything that might give our position away. If those Supercrusiers get toasted-"

"It'll be us and them." Hester finished. "Understood. Shutting all non-essential systems down."

Darkness fell on the Pelican. The roar of the engines died, and the cabin lights shut off. The ship slowly began to turn, drifting away from the battle. Christian floated up against his restraints, the pseudo-gravity produced by the dropship's forward momentum removed.

It turned so much that the viewers almost missed the event that turned the tide in the favor of the UNSC.

Directly behind the Supercruiser's, space twisted again. But it wasn't a hyperspace transition; this was the "bubble-of-energy" transition of a Slipspace jump. In seconds, more followed. Three, four, five, then a dozen, two...the number of jumps simply kept rising. The amount of radiation released from all of these was enough to cause a massive fluctuation in the local gas giants atmosphere, creating a brilliant swirl of colors that spread across its surface for tens of thousands of kilometers. Bursts of lighting lit this swirl, giving an eerie backdrop for the arrival of more ships.

The Slipspace transitions completed. From them came almost three dozen ships;

All UNSC design.

Christian, watching from "below", felt awe at the sheer size of the friendly fleet. Scattered throughout it was at least one of every type of ship of the line in the Navy. He recognized frigates, destroyers, carriers, at least one supercarrier, cruisers of all sorts, a refitted Phoenix-class colony ship, and what might have been a Prowler-class corvette, lit for a moment against the chaotic dance of clouds and energy. And swarming around them were Longswords (Advanced and "vanilla"), Shortsword bombers, Cutlass's, and Sabers.

But the total amount of ships hadn't arrived yet. A massive Slipspace portal opened at the opposite end of the line of UNSC vessels, larger than anything Christian, Singe, or any of the other Spartans had ever seen. At least, Christian was pretty sure he hadn't seen it before; as he watched the portal grow to full size and stabilize, he felt a sudden, swooping rush of deja vu.

From it emerged a true monstrosity of a ship.

It was bigger than anything in the local space, even the Supercruisers. Christian estimated its length at ten kilometers...at least. It's back was a solid hexagonal block, half it's total length. Hangers, weapons platforms, and what looked like repair docks for just about every UNSC ship model ran along these same sides. At the stern were engines, massive deals that were obviously of Covenant design. From the bow emerged what Penny identified as MAC guns. But these, like the ship they were mounted upon, were bigger than any other ones in local space. There were six of them, one mounted on each of the six sides of the ship, and each looked powerful enough to hurl a half-million metric ton slug to almost the speed of light. On the one nearest one to the Pelican was written the ship's name. Christian felt a chill as he read it.

_Reach_.

There was only one ship in the entire UNSC to bear that name, the one of the planet where the UNSC had made its final real stand against the Covenant...and lost so many men and ships, only to have the Covenant win anyway.

This ship, floating before Christian, was the first of the series built to prevent that from ever happening again, a ship that had taken more than ten years to design, build, and perfect, helped along by both the Elites and recovered Forerunner technology.

This was the first of the _Retaliation_-class.

"Turn the power back on." Christian said to Singe. "Something tells me we're going to be alright."

He was right. The frigates, seeing this new threat, turned their attention (and turbolasers) on to the massed vessels.

Beams of light slammed into shields. Most held. Those ships that had lost theirs quickly fell back behind the line, new ships with full defenses moving up to take their place.

As one, the UNSC ships returned fire. Dozens of MAC guns fired in unison, a literal swarm of metal slugs closing the distance between the fleets in moments. Multiple weights and compositions, everything from the standard MAC round to light triple rounds to the massive "Little Super" rounds, the strongest available to any ship without a Super MAC Gun (such as the ones installed on space stations or a planet-side bases) blinked in the light.

The frigates saw them coming, attempted to escape them by rising, dropping and simply turning into them, hoping to present a smaller target.

All these tactics failed. Most of the MAC shots hit their targets.

Three frigates exploded out-right, multiple rounds blasting huge gouges in their hulls and damaging their engines, which overloaded. The debris from one of these destroyed ships rammed its neighbor, removing its shields and opening it for a heavy MAC round to plow through the bow, gutting the ship from step to stern, and exit out the back, leaving a long cloud of slag in its wake. Its lights died, and it floated away from the group.

The other four, which had been lagging slightly behind the first group, saw what the rounds did to their allies and came to a stop. Readings, provided by Penny, showed them dumping power from weapons into their shields.

The remaining MAC rounds hit, but none of the ships fell; their boosted shields saw them through.

But the shields didn't protect against momentum.

The leading ship took most of the rounds, each round pushing the ship back more. With all it's power devoted to shields, the frigate had no way to stop this backward movement. Even after the last MAC slug had impacted, it continued to move (followings Newton's First Law of Motion, stating that an object in motion will stay in motion until acted upon) until it was acted upon; in this case, by sailing straight into the bow of the frigate behind it. The forward frigates shields failed, and the rear frigate impacted its engines without any resistance. The stern of the forward frigate crumpled, and in seconds its engines detonated, consuming both ships in a nuclear fireball. The two remaining ships escaped their allies' fate, and started their engines up again; ready to continue the attack despite the incredible odds against them.

For a moment, Christian felt a spark of irrational fear return.

Then the _Reach _joined the fight. The _Retribution_-class's giant engines flared, producing enough light that the glass before Christian's eyes darkened to prevent it's occupants from being blinded. It maneuvered to the side of the two remaining frigates. Penny's reading showed power surging from its core, flowing towards one of the MAC guns.

_Oh fuck_, was all Christian could think of to say. _This is gonna be-_

The _Reach_'s Number One MAC gun fired. The cockpit glass darkened again, the blast was so bright. A massive slug, easily the size of a Longsword, if not bigger, soared through space.

It slammed into the first frigate, pierced its engines...and continued.

It smashed through the center of the second frigate, cutting it almost completely in two...and still moved forward.

It reached the CIS command ship, and scored a direct hit on it, blowing through the remains of the port arm, the globular command bridge in the center, and the undamaged right arm, and continued onward as if nothing had been in its way, out towards the edge of the system.

The three damaged ships floated serenely, surrounded by halo's of their own innards.

_-Awesome._ Christian finally finished his thought from earlier. He sat back and smiled.

"That was bloody fucking amazing." Singe said quietly, pronouncing "fucking" as "fuking".

"That is was." Christian replied, just as quietly. He looked out at the _Reach_, which was moving back into position with the rest of the fleet, and noticed he was shaking in his seat.

While the UNSC might technically be primitives from the views of the CIS and Republic, they could still kick ass.

The Spartan turned to the pilot.

"Put us on a course for the _Kelly_," He ordered. "We have some talking to do with our new friends."

He paused, looked over the disabled Star Destroyers. "If they're still able to talk."

Singe nodded, fed fuel to her engines, and accelerated towards the UNSC fleet.


	8. Revelations

**A/N: And now, for some edits and explanations.**

**First; As of this chapter, the Spartan-IV's are not wearing MK III or IIIb armor any more. As several people have pointed out, this is A) bad tactical thinking (I believe someone said it was like throwing a WW II ear Sherman tank against today's heavy weights), and B) the SPARTAN program is one of the most effective programs in the UNSC. As such, they would be awarded quite a bit of money during the reconstruction of the UNSC. They'd need them. And so, they are now clad in MK VI/B (which is not, despite what the title suggests, a permutation of the MK VI armor, but rather an almost completely new suit, manufactured by a private company in the style of the Mark V (B), the default armor for Noble Six in Halo Reach), which is similar to the MK VI worn by the Master Chief, except that it doesn't increase strength and speed as much (as it is more focused on stealth than out-right combat, both as a tactical decision and also so that each suit of armor is less expensive), it's helmet looks more like the EVA armor permutation or SPI armor, with a full-face visor, and it has a cloaking system befitting it's stealth role provided by the Covenant Separatists (as shown in the last chapter). Secondly, all of this now takes place about ten years after the end of the War. I've checked, and this seems like a plausible amount of time for the UNSC to get back on their feet, if they focus mainly on their military for the first couple years, then move to reclaiming their empire, and received help from the Elites (which everything I've read points to them doing). At this point, the UNSC hasn't even begun to reclaim planets, other than a couple in the Inner Colonies and some worlds that escaped glassing being resettled by the populations of planets that escaped the Covenant and refugees.**

**Additionally, to the couple of people who pointed out that most of my Spartans seemingly "came from the U.S."; you've only seen one full team and one partial, Alpha and Beta. And Alpha Team is made mainly of people who came from the same solar system (Epsilon Eridani, the system that Reach is in). There are a lot more IV's out in the field. And besides, most of the Spartan-II's we know of had similar names (John, Fred, Kelly, Linda, Grace, Arthur, Isaac, William, etc.). Sure, there were others (Fajad, Li, Solomon, Jorge) but the majority had names that "came from the U.S." So, for that matter, do a lot of the other non-Spartan characters. So let's let it be, okay? **

**Also, regarding the many reviews I got saying that Alpha Team "aren't Spartans"; **

**Have any of you guys who are writing those review read the book Ghosts of Onyx and the short story Headhunters in Halo Evolutions? For those of you who haven't, they concern another group of Spartans, known as the Spartan-III's (I apologize to anyone who's actually read them for this). The III's were a top-secret, expendable run of Spartans created to be used against high value, heavily defended Covenant targets. Suicide missions, basically. Because of their expendable nature, they had to be cheaper, and there needed to be a lot of them. So, the recruiters looked into the largest source of possible child candidates (the super-young indoctrination plan was kept from the Spartan-II's) in the UNSC; war orphans. Of course, you aren't going to get the extreme perfection of the Spartan-II's from such a motley group of children; they're going to have problems. They fight with each other. They swear. They have mental problems off the handle. They even talk back to their CO's (a good example of that, taken from Halo Reach; the cutscene at the end of the second real mission (ONI: Sword Base) where Carter talks back to Dr. Halsey).**

**I say this simply because the III's and my IV's are not so different. The IV's are, effectively, the III's, with better armor, slightly better training, and not expendable. Well, except for Alpha Team, but that'll be revealed later in the chapter. **

**Finally, the mass of ships that saved the Spartans in the last chapter (which has now been shrunk to more like 36 or so ships, which is certainly not the biggest mass of UNSC ships ever (unlike, say, the Battle of Psi Serpentis, which had 162 ships,) but still large) will also be explained in this chapter.**

**Also, I've gone back over the past chapters and changed several sections, mainly adding more stuff and adding new intel gained from the most recent season of Clone War. Those of you who like to be in the loop, you might want to look back over them again. It's not necessary, but helpful. **

**Anyway, hope this chapter answers some questions. Enjoy.**

**Chapter 7**

**Revelations**

A couple hours after leaving the frigate, and following a quick debriefing and mission report, Christian and the rest of Alpha Team were in their barracks on the _Kelly_, readying themselves for the upcoming meeting between the Republic and UNSC commanders.

He, Hester and Coraline were using the shower, Echo and Matt were in the next room looking over the team's armor, and Kelly was in the group's small armory, doing routine maintenance on and adding more hash marks to her sniper rifle. Christian could hear her talking softly to herself as she did.

Alpha Team's leader glanced over at the other Spartans in the shower with him. Like pretty much every other military shower in the UNSC, it was built for function and not much else. As such, there weren't any privacy barriers or stalls, simply a length of wall and floor with tiles on them and some basic shower heads. The Spartans didn't mind. They were soldiers; they'd seen each other nude before. It didn't register with them. Like the Spartan-II's before them, all Spartan-IV's received a catalytic thyroid implant during their augmentation. One of the side-effects of this was a massively-decreased sexual drive. If anything, this was seen as a good thing. Soldiers couldn't be squeamish; if you couldn't look at your buddy while he was showering, what would you do when he was bleeding out on the battlefield?

Christian was actually glad he could see his teammates while they were showering; it made it easier for him to make sure they didn't have any injuries they had "forgotten" to tell him about.

He checked over Hester first, as she was closest. She was fine, no new bruises or injuries. No new scars either, just the one across the bridge of her nose. But she had received that one from the wrong end of an Energy Sword on their first mission together, thanks to a berserk Brute Chieftain. Ironically, that Sword was now the very one that Echo had carried with her to the frigate.

Other than the scar, the only things that was of interest on Hester's face were her eyes (which seemed to be colored a mixture of red and brown), the slightly-tanned skin around them (any darkened skin being a rarity amongst Spartan-IV's, who, like their Spartan-II forerunners, spent so much time in their armor that their skin had lost most of its pigmentation due to lack of exposure to solar radiation) and the massive tattoo she wore. It, ironically, was of a scar itself, a massive one that slashed down from the base of her UNSC-standard buzz cut, just above her right eye, through her nose and mouth, and stopped on the lower left of her chin. Christian had always thought it made her look like a portrait that someone had crossed out in a fit of anger. He'd never learned the origin of the tattoo, but that was just fine with him.

Hester was fine, so Christian turned his attention to the only other visible Spartan, Coraline. A quick check showed that, she too, was fine. Nothing of note except a large bruise on her shoulder, easily visible against her deathly pale skin. Christian grunted to himself.

Hearing him, Coraline turned and looked at him quizzically.

"Something wrong, boss?" She asked, scrubbing at a section of her right arm. Christian shook his head.

"Nothing." Alpha Team's leader looked down at the water running around his feet, eyes easily tracking the trails of soap bubbles flowing down the drain in the center of the floor. "Just making sure you were okay."

"I'm good." Coraline replied. Christian found himself smiling.

"That's what you said back on Emerald Cove," He replied. "And then after we finished with those Jackal pirates I find out you'd broken a couple ribs and your right arm in that fall."

Coraline sighed in response and closed her brown eyes, reaching up to rub some soap into her close-cropped black hair.

"Yeah, good times." She said, leaning back against the tiled wall. This motion revealed her own set of tattoos, which were probably some of the most unique in any of the Spartan teams.

Inked around her eye-sockets and on her eyelids were the images of four-hole buttons, like you would find on clothing from the 20th century. Basically put, it looked as if someone had sewn buttons over Coraline's eyes.

Those buttons weren't the only ink Coraline had adorned herself with. In addition to the identification bar code on the back of her neck that all UNSC personnel had and her Spartan number on her right shoulder (a mark shared only by her fellow Spartan-IV's) she'd had the image of a metallic, skeletal hand fitted over her real flesh-and-blood right hand, the two matching exactly.

She, like Hester, had never explained the origins of these strange adornments, but Christian had his theories. Primary of which related to the shared name of his teammate and the main character of an early 21st century stop-motion animation film. This theory also helped explain why, for a while, Coraline had dyed her hair a vivid blue color.

"Boss, just finished running through our gear." Matt called from the armory, voice echoing through the door and off the shower walls. "Looks fine. Couple new scratches, and it looks like there's something going on with Echo's camo, but other than that, they're in pretty good shape."

"Good." Christian shut the shower off and grabbed his towel from the rack next to him, drying himself quickly and efficiently. "Keep working. And get that glitch in Echo's camo checked out."

"Where are you going?" Coraline asked. Christian shrugged.

"Bridge. Keyes wanted to see me. See what our orders are."

Coraline acknowledged him, then went back to showering. Christian, snagging his off-duty uniform from his locker, walked and dressed at the same time. He'd just pulled his shirt on when he reached the door. It slid open for him, and he walked through.

The halls of the Supercrusier were quiet. All of the crew were doing their assigned duties, and most of the Marine compliment was on the near-by moon, securing the remains of the frigate, which had fallen to it's surface, for retrieval. What they were securing it from, Christian didn't know. But he guessed that the UNSC didn't exactly trust the Republic fully. He knew for sure he personally didn't.

Christian's walking led him past a viewpoint. He paused, taking in the majesty of the UNSC fleet. The dark of space was light with the light of dozens of engines, and the brilliant glow of repair teams working on the _Reach_.

As he looked, a question formed in his mind;

How had this massive fleet gotten here so quickly?

Then it hit him; While they were at the very edge of what had been UNSC territory before the Human-Covenant War had shrunk it down to almost nothing, and while that was really only about 12 light-years or so from the Sol system, it still should have taken weeks, if not _months_ for the ships to arrive...had they not been running on Covenant tech based (but human and found Forerunner tech improved) Slipstream drives controlled by next-generation AI's.

But all of these ships _were_ running on those very engines. That was one of the things the Covenant Separatists had given the UNSC in reconciliation for what they had done; access to their technology. Though the act wasn't as selfless as it sounded. The truth was, ironically, the Elites didn't know how to fix their own ships. They could use them, and were devastating when commanding them, but when they broke they didn't know what was wrong and couldn't do anything about it. Their old obsession with not desecrating Forerunner tech (the same one that had sparked the war with the Prophets that lead to the creation of the Covenant) prevented them for keeping their fleets operational. And they couldn't easily learn; for centuries, the Covenant thought process had been imitative rather than intuitive, and it had been the Prophets who did most of the imitation. The Elites had simply been the brawn to the Prophet's brains.

So, to keep themselves combat ready, they let the UNSC study their ships, find out how they worked, and find out how to fix them. A plan that suited the humans just fine. They (as the Elites expected, and even encouraged,) incorporated the new tech into their own ships, giving them better reactors, faster engines, stronger armor, and shields. All abilities that had been shown in the recent battle.

The size of the fleet was easier to explain; during his debriefing, Christian had leafed through the list of the ship ID's that he'd been given. He recognized quite a few names out of the three-dozen total ships; the frigates _Lancelot_, _Paris_, _Redoubtable_, _Commonwealth_ and _Tannenberg, _destroyers _Resolute, Tharsis_, _Pioneer_, _Seattle_, and _Bunker Hill, _the standard corvettes _Two For Flinching, Coral Sea _and _Pony Express_, the Prowler-Class corvette _Dusk_, and even ships as big as the carrier _All Under Heaven, _the Marathon-class cruisers _Hannibal _and _Leviathan_, and (though Christian had to look twice to be sure) the once-mighty(as it was now outclassed by the _Spartan_-class ships) supercarrier _Trafalgar_.

Now, these names alone weren't impressive, other than their origins. The impressive part was that Christian remembered quite a few of these ships listed as lost with all hands in the Human-Covenant War. He was pretty sure the _Commonwealth _had been almost destroyed over Chi Ceti IV early in the war and sent to the shipbreaking yard on Reach, and he knew for dead sure the _Trafalgar_ had been eliminated; he'd seen it's remains over Reach twice, once during his orphanages hurried, last-minute run from the city of New Alexandria through the enclosing Covenant armada during the beginning of the end for the planet, and later during a zero-g training exercise with the other Spartan-IV's over the still-glassed remains of the planet, tumbling endlessly around and around in the huge ship graveyard that still encircled the planet, despite ten years of clearing efforts.

The reason that these ships were now on the front lines lay in that graveyard, and the scant few similar ones the Covenant had constructed. These graveyards consisted of destroyed ship from both sides, but most of the debris was usually UNSC craft, as during space battles, the requirements for eliminating an enemy ship were quite different for the two sides. The human Navy had to completely destroy an enemy ship to remove it from the battle. The Covenant, on the other hand, simply had to kill enough of the crew on board to make the ship nothing but a floating hulk; something they could easily do, and did. Because of this, many UNSC ships fell still relatively intact...including many of the one hundred or so that fell at Reach. And they had been there since the end of the war, undisturbed by either side except for the Covenant recovery operation that had moved them into the graveyard.

So, about a year after the end of the conflict, when the UNSC Logistical Operational Command, or NavLogCom, was given the task of finding a way to bring the Navy back to it's former glory (or at least to a level that would let it protect the UNSC as it rebuilt itself), they suggested something that, under other circumstances, would have never been considered; take these dead ships and revitalize them. It was entirely possible; according to the after-action reports that Christian had seen from ONI Section 3 regarding Operation: FIRST STRIKE, the famous AI Cortana had retrieved the frigate _Gettysburg _from the graveyard and reactivated it some time just before the First Battle of Earth. Christian had been aboard the frigate itself during several anti-Insurrection missions and had seen the bizarre Slipspace drive it had installed, supposedly removed from a captured Covenant flagship.

And, if they couldn't reactivate them...well, there was a lot of raw materials just floating there. And the Reach shipbreaking yards _were_ still relatively intact...

Naturally, there had been fighting; everyone from other parts of the Naval High Command to civilians voiced their complaints. But, despite this, one fact stood out. The UNSC needed ships, and (as NavLogCom was extremely quick to point out), they didn't have the money, time, materials, or shipyards to make new ones, at least not in the number required by the UNSC.

So began what most detractors considered a massive grave-robbing. People had still tried to stop it, but the majority believed it a necessity. And it had given results better than NavLogCom could have hoped for; from the Reach graveyard alone, they had reactivated almost one hundred fifty ships.

And, thinking about what had just happened and what could have been, Christian found himself agreeing with the operation. If this fleet of friendly ships hadn't shown up when it did, the battle might have turned out differently.

But then there was the _Reach_; from the reports he'd seen, the ships of the _Retaliation_-class weren't supposed to be operational for several months, at the very least. Which was probably why the _Reach _was undergoing repairs at that moment. The UNSC must have rushed it out to fight this new enemy, completely untested. The combat had probably cause all sorts of problems for the ship. Christian was impressed that the ship had actually managed to make it this far; during the construction of the _Retaliations_, there had been problems of all kinds, from funding to construction supplies down to things as simple as a messed-up shipping order. On several occasion, the entire project was in danger of being scrapped, but every time something came up it would be solved, sometimes at the very last moment.

Christian looked once more a the _Reach_, then shook his head and pulled himself away from the viewport.

As he walked on, he noticed a bulletin board on the wall. Not being in any undo hurry (he wasn't supposed to be at the bridge for another half-hour, according to the clock on the board), he looked it over. Standard notices covered it's surface; advertisements for things to be bought and sold, lost item notes (including, to Christian's surprise, a calico cat by the name of Jonesy), letters to crew-members and Marines, pictures and memorabilia relating to the groups assigned to the ship-

And, in the very center of the board, a poster showing himself and his team, decked out in full gear and striking poses.

**Spartan Alpha Team**, it proclaimed. **First In, Last Out. **

Christian found himself laughing at the poster. It made his group look so...well, heroic, for lack of a better term. That was probably the point. It was propaganda, pure and simple. Another ploy by ONI Section 2 to remind the soldiers of the UNSC that the Human-Covenant War was done, and they were no longer on the verge of extinction.

The thing was, Alpha wasn't poster worthy, not in the least. On the outside, they may have looked like it, but in truth they were practically the exact opposite. There was a secret behind the origin of the team, one known only to its members, some of the other Spartans (Beta Team, primarily), and the highest ranking officers of the Admiralty, ONI Section 3 Beta-5 and the SPARTAN-IV program.

Though Christian would never tell a soul on his own (due in half to the sickening feeling thinking of it gave him, and an above-Top Secret classification), Alpha Team were the misfits of the Spartan-IV's. They were the screw-ups, the black sheep, the soldiers with problems arising from the augmentation process and their lives before the UNSC that should have kicked them off the front line and into therapy or psych evaluations, but were too tactically valuable to have locked up.

Not that they were the only group to have troubles. Most of the newer Spartans had _something_ going on with them. You weren't going to get the ultimate professionalism of the Spartan-II's from the war orphans and the kids who slid through the UNSC's cracks, which was where most of the IV's came from (Christian included). Most of the kids who signed up for the Spartan-IV class did so not for any patriotic duty or to make their families proud. Sure, some of them did, but that was the minority. There just weren't that many "perfect" recruits left in the UNSC. Not because anyone who fit that bill was hesitant to join (they weren't)...there just simply weren't that many. Most of the candidates the UNSC would have looked for were long dead, crushed under the unstoppable onslaught of the Covenant.

So the UNSC was forced to take what they could get for the Spartan-IV's. Because, if there was one thing they needed, it was Spartans. During the War, the Spartan-II's had been effectively all that stood between humanity and extinction. And now that John-117 was Missing in Action with the rest of them, they needed more. So they turned to the largest available source of possible candidates; orphanages and homeless shelters all across the remains of UNSC space. After all, if there was one thing the UNSC had plenty of, it was orphans. And, as hoped, most of those given the offer jumped at the chance. They did it for either of, and sometimes both, two reasons; the chance of revenge against the Covenant for thirty or so years of hell, and the possibility of a (relatively) safe and stable life, shelter, and three or more square meals a day. The extremely good (for the military) payment plan, the super-human abilities after augmentation and the fame of being a Spartan...those were bonuses.

And that was if they signed up at all. Those two reasons only covered two-thirds of the IV's, and the ones who were there for friends, family, and the "good-old UNSC" were barely another eighth. The rest (Christian had heard) had already been pulled from orphanages and shelters and even straight off the streets on planets all over the UNSC towards the end of the War by ONI for some unknown project that got cut when the war ended. Because they were there, they were shunted into the IV program to boost its ranks. Christian had heard that this project was part of the experimental Spartan-III program that was the testing grounds for the IV's, but he didn't believe it. The III's hadn't been more than a small group, and they'd never seen combat. They were the guinea pigs for the Spartan-IV's, nothing more, like how the Orion Project had been the prototypes of the Spartan-II's. What would they need several hundred candidates for?

And then there was that small group that didn't seem to have pasts, and sometimes said stuff as if they'd been born before the Great War, like that Fajad guy, or whatever his name was...

Yet each member or Alpha Team (Christian included, though he hated to admit it) had problems that were much more serious than most of the other IV's. Admittedly, some of that wasn't their fault; they were part of the first group to be augmented with the new (mostly experimental) program, and as such they were the victims of most of the mistakes made during that process that were avoided in later groups. Hell, they'd been lucky, considering what had happened to some of the other candidates. But the facts still remained;

Hester had become bipolar and depressed, to the point of an attempted suicide, after the augmentation process due to an unforeseen reaction with some of the chemicals used. She took meds for it, but these only helped so much.

Coraline had suffered from a similar reaction, and sometimes had hallucinations of a boy (apparently named "Wybie") that had never existed and a severed metal hand, possibly the same one she had tattooed on her own hand. She, too, took medication.

Kelly had been lucky to escape and trouble from the augmentation process, but she'd carried something with her from before becoming a Spartan. For some reason, she treated her rifle (which she had also brought with her into the Spartan-IV program, having acquired it sometime during the last months of the War) as if it were a living, sentient thing, rather than an expendable piece of equipment, talking to and having conversations with it when she was alone and even sleeping with it at points. She'd even risked her life to rescue it from the vacuum of space.

And Matt had something similar to Kelly's trouble; sometimes, he got extremely violent, and had been incarcerated on several occasions for fighting his fellow Spartans, including one occasion where he's almost broken Christian's arm.

And, of course, Echo. Her problems were obvious; the rampant xenophobia, emotional disorders, her habits of collecting macabre trophies and desecrating corpses, what Christian had been told was possibly the worse case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder ever recorded...it was a pretty long list. Some things could be explained, certainly. The PTSD and xenophobia came from an event during the closing months of the Human-Covenant War, in which she and her family had been captured by Brutes. She had been forced to watch her parents and relatives be toyed with and then _eaten_ by the beasts, before almost falling to the same fate, saved only by her quick thinking in luring the Chieftain of the Brutes following her into an airlock and blasting him out of the ship. The rampant trophy collecting had started there as well (her first piece collected was a section of the Chieftain's armor) and the corpse desecration was a more visible version of something most of the Spartan-IV's probably had; a deep-set, mostly hidden feeling that, no matter what they did, they would never really be Spartans like the famous II class. Christian knew for sure he felt it.

Other parts of her condition couldn't be easily labeled. No-one was really sure where Echo had gotten her strange emotional tendencies, even though she'd been studied by pretty much every major shrink in the UNSC, but the most common consensus was some kind of chemical imbalance or similar problem.

The only thing that had kept her on the team (and in combat) was an even longer list of medications than the rest of Alpha and her impressive kill record, one that had awarded her the much-coveted title of "hyper-lethal vector". In fact, (if Christian remembered correctly) with the mass of kills she'd attained this last mission, the silent Spartan had iced over 600 enemy personnel...officially. Who knew how many people she had killed outside of public UNSC jurisdiction.

The events of the frigate made Christian realize the girl had probably stopped taking her pills again, though it probably wasn't her fault in this case. Alpha _had_ been rushed out here, with little time to do anything else. He made a mental note to remind her to take them when he got the time.

And then there was Christian himself.

Christian suffered from a radiation-induced neurological disorder, similar to the infamous Boryn's Syndrome, which was colloquially known as "dream madness". It had a real name, but Christian couldn't pronounce it. A person suffering from this affliction would occasionally have vivid, intense nightmares, which they usually couldn't wake from. Their bodies had trouble telling them from reality, and when they did finally wake up from these, they often believed themselves still in the nightmare, and would act as such for a while, ranting and doing bizarre things.

But that description was for a normal human. Christian's case was much worse. The last time he'd had one of his nightmares, almost a month ago...he'd awoken on top of Hester, covered in blood and pressing a loaded and armed M6C into her mouth. The event had landed him a week in the brig and two months with a psychologist.

Christian shuddered at the memory and shoved it deep into his mind. He mentally reminded himself to grab some sleeping pills from the ships' inventory when he had the chance. They seemed to help...sometimes.

But no matter how much he tried to ignore it, the fact still remained; Alpha had problems. And this fact effected more than just them. It effected how the brass saw them.

Even their rallying cry showed it. The words First In, Last Out were double-edged. The way they were usually said, they inspired confidence, spawned visions of the best of the best, Spartans that wouldn't stop until it was done, and didn't retreat or give ground. Warriors that that were the first into the fight, and the ones that would hold the line for their fellows when it was time to leave.

And, in part, that was true; that was what Alpha did. All the Spartans did it. That was what a Spartan was.

It also meant that, when an unexpected and possibly dangerous situation came up (like the arrival of the frigate), Alpha was sent in first. They would be given the toughest jobs, often in unfamiliar, usually hostile, territory, with little or no back up. Supposedly, it was because they were the best; they had received the most extreme end of the augmentation spectrum, and because of it they were physically better than any other Spartan-IV unit. It was also what they had been trained for; unlike the Spartan-II's, where every team did whatever was necessary, the IV's were more specialized, with each team having a broad range of training and one area that they received much more. Alpha Team's was first combat, befitting their rallying cry, Beta was reconnaissance and scouting, and so on.

But those were only the half-truths. The fact remained that whenever HIGHCOM came up with a Spartan missions that had the possibility of the operatives on it being...cut loose to maintain plausible deniability, Alpha Team was sent in.

They'd probably handle suicide missions, if the UNSC ever devised one. Thankfully for Alpha Team, there hadn't been any. But still the threat loomed large in their collective minds.

Once again, Christian shook himself loose from his thoughts. Thinking about his team's problems wouldn't help him; and, even with their individual troubles, Alpha Team was still one of the best Spartan squads in the UNSC. And no amount of negative thinking could change that.

Plus, he had a meeting with Captain Keyes.

Shaking his head and sighing, Christian continued his walk to the bridge.

* * *

"So that's where we stand, Masters." Anakin said. He sighed, catching his breath after his lengthy report to the Jedi Council. Again before him in holographic form were Generals Kenobi and Windu, and additionally Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. The latter of these great men clasped his hands together and glanced at the other two with him.

"Well, I for one am glad to hear we have avoided any problems with this...United Earth Government, did you say they called themselves?"

"Yes, Excellency." Anakin answered. "Though we're technically dealing with their military here. The United Nations Space Command."

"So they have a military separate from their central government. Intriguing."

"Indeed, Chancellor." Kenobi added. "But something still troubles me; how did that frigate get to UNSC space? And why did Dooku send so many ships, and Ventress, after it? What is so important about this single ship?"

"I still have no answer for that, Master." Said Anakin, voice tinged with frustration and regret. "But the Spartan's artificial intelligence, Penny, said she might have one soon. She managed to strip the frigates data banks during her time on board. She's sorting through the data now."

"She so easily infiltrated their systems?" Palpatine said, slightly awed, and possibly a little worried. Anakin understood this feeling. If "Penny" had broken the Separatist's data banks so easily, what could she do against a Republic computer...

"According to her, there was a fail-safe in the system that was supposed to wipe the whole system clean, but we damaged it during the battle over Bakura. When it activated, it only succeeded in wiping out most of the encryption systems. She called it an "open book", I believe."

"And your ships? How are repairs going?" Windu asked. Anakin did a quick look around the bridge; the _Resolute_ and her escorts had taken a serious beating from the enemy frigates. Even now, hours later, clones were working on just about every possible surface, repairing and replacing parts that had been damaged and destroyed by the CIS attack. The air still stunk of smoke, and in a few places exposed wires let out showers of sparks. Most of the bridges screens remained dark.

"Repairs are progressing, but slowly. But most of the major systems are still operational; we can move, and our guns and shields are combat ready again." Anakin paused, and looked back over his shoulder, out the viewport towards the massive fleet of UNSC ships. "I guess we have our new friends to thank for that. If that fleet of theirs hadn't show up when it did..."

"Something we will have to mention to them when we negotiate." Palpatine said, smiling in his trademark way. "Speaking of that, have the details of our upcoming talk been worked out?"

"Yes. The UNSC has given us the use of their space station. We can bring one transport to the meeting, carrying five people; the negotiator, and a small security detail of four soldiers. They will have an equal sized group on board. Am I right to assume our negotiator will be General Kenobi?"

"Well, I would seem the best choice." Kenobi said modestly. But Anakin could see the small smile on his lips. "Plus, I _am_ the closest. I was already in route to re-enforce you when this happened. Does the UNSC have a negotiator as well?"

"Captain Keyes said that one is en-route to our position now."

"Good. Then I shall see you when I arrive. Kenobi out." With a warble and a shimmer of light, Kenobi's hologram disappeared into nothing. Palpatine turned to Windu.

"This is most exciting." He said, betraying none of the stated emotion in his face. "If you would excuse me, I must prepare a speech for this occasion."

Windu nodded to him, and Palpatine evaporated into the electronic ether. The bald Jedi Master turned to Anakin, his face suddenly more serious (if that was possible). He dropped his voice, tone as serious as his face.

"Skywalker, is it true what Ahsoka said? About the Force? That these...Spartans seemed immune to it?"

"I don't know, Master. I wasn't there in the hanger. But their leader, Christian, did resist my attempt at Alter Mind."

"Perhaps he merely had a strong mind."

"That is what I am hoping, Master."

"Let's just hope it is right. Where is Ahsoka now?"

"In the med-bay. She sustained some injuries during her fight with Ventress, but nothing severe. She'll be back on her feet soon."

"Good. When you see her, tell her I'd like a full report on what happened on the frigate."

"Understood Master. Anything else?"

Windu paused, thinking.

"Be careful, Skywalker. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not have these people as an enemy."

"I agree." Anakin bowed to Windu, who cut the connection. He turned from the holotable and walked down the hallway behind the bridge, heading for the med-bay. He had his own questions for Ahsoka.

* * *

When Christian stepped onto the _Kelly_'s bridge, all was quiet. The only sounds were the soft chatter of the bridge crew going about their assigned tasks, terminals spewing data, and sensors reporting in. For a moment, he simply stood, taking it all in.

Then he noticed Captain Keyes was standing before the large holographic tactical map that had been lowered from the ceiling, and stopped dead.

The Captain was an imposing figure. Not just because of her high Navy pedigree (she _was_ the daughter of Jacob Keyes, after all), but physically as well. She towered over most of the bridge crew, and was only slightly shorter than Christian. Height wasn't the only thing, though; through the back of her uniform, Christian could see a series of ridges, corresponding with the vertebrae on her spinal cord. He knew what they were; these ridges were the reason Keyes was standing here now.

Every person with high enough clearance knew what had happened to Miranda Keyes; The events that took place in the super-luminal communication array of the Ark were recorded by the cameras in the Pelican dropship the then-Commander had crashed into it in an attempt to stop the activation of the entire Halo array by the Prophet of Truth. Christian had seen them; her single-handed defeat of several Brutes, Johnson's desperate plea, her hesitation...and the sudden flat-lining of her brainwaves as the Prophet shot her in the back with a Type-25 Carbine, better known as a Spiker.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of it. But Keyes had gotten lucky; the spike rounds hadn't seriously damaged anything important. Keyes had been effectively dead, but her body was mostly intact. After the Halo firing was stopped by the Master Chief and the Arbiter, Johnson had brought Keyes's body back to _Forward Until Dawn_, and had it placed in cryo-sleep, preserving her in a just-post death state. The cryopod he chose for her had been in the bow section of the frigate, and as such, when the ship was sliced in half by the collapsing Portal from the Ark to Earth, it had returned to Earth with the Arbiter. It was discovered as recovery teams ripped apart the wreckage, searching for survivors. Throughout the ride, the pod's power had stayed on, and Keyes's body had been untouched. Quickly but quietly, it was transferred to the most advanced hospital with facilities open to take it; the space-borne field hospital UNSC _Hopeful_. The space station was an almost mythical object to the men and women who fought and died on the front lines. The station's staff had a reputation for saving lives, and in many cases literally bringing the dead back to life. At least, as far as the rapid resuscitation of recently-dead patients went.

It was that very skill that brought Miranda Keyes back from the brink. Though she had technically been dead for several days, the time in cryo-sleep had stopped any and all decomposition or the other effects associated with death, as its designers had intended it to. Biologically, she had only been dead for a couple hours; an amount of time that was nothing to the doctors of the _Hopeful_, who had once brought back a man who had been exposed to hard vacuum for a full day after being ejected from a Covenant ship hit by a Super MAC round.

So they brought Miranda back, but it seemed she was living on borrowed time; the damage to her spine and central organs wasn't extensive, but enough to leave her paralyzed and effectively in a vegetative state, which she would probably stay in until she died.

Ironically, it was the Spartan program that let her continue living. During the ten years since the end of the War, some of the things learned from the Spartan's augmentations had been released to the medical community. Among these things were the rewiring of their nerve system and neural dendrites, and a technique to replace completely repair and replace bones still inside a patient's body. A doctor (his identity long since classified by ONI for reasons of their own) figured out how to put these two techniques, together with a small amount of flash cloning, into a single operation, which was then conducted on Keyes. During it, surgeons removed most of her damaged flesh, bones and nerves. Replacement flesh was flash cloned, bones created from calcium molds, and fabricated superconductive nerve tissue grown. Then, the fabricated nerves were strung through the calcium molded bones, the new bones were inserted into Keyes spinal area, replacing the damaged ones, and sealed with replacement flesh.

The operation was an immense success. Keyes not only regained full motor skill (after a long recovery period) and most of her memories, she seemed to have benefited from the augmentations as well; she was faster, much faster than a normal human, but not quite up to a Spartan's speed. Her new bones were stronger than her original ones as well. This same strength also made her vertebrae a bit larger than the average human. Hence the ridges visible on her back.

The only negative effect that had come out of the operation was a noticeable chance in Keyes's mental state; she had become colder, more ruthless, a change that top UNSC psychologists said wasn't uncommon in people who were resuscitated after being medically dead. But this was actually seen a good thing by most of the UNSC brass; if there was one thing the Navy needed most, it was leaders who were willing to do whatever it took to win. Something the new Keyes agreed with completely.

"Captain Keyes." Christian said, getting her attention.

"Chief. Right on time. Good." Keyes's cold voice broke Christian from his thoughts.

"Thank you, Captain. Reporting as ordered." He replied. Keyes turned and held out her hand to him. He shook it.

"Let's get you up to speed." Keyes turned and walked bow-ward, towards the large window that was installed at the front of the bridge. Like the _Halcyon_-class cruisers they had been modeled after, the _Spartan_-class Supercruiser's bridge was under the main body of the ship, overshadowed by the section housing the three MAC guns. Keyes stopped before the largest of the transparent panes, gazing out across the infinite blackness of space. Christian joined her.

"We've been in contact with the Republic ships," Keyes explained. "They want to talk. Orders from FleetCom are to do just that. As of now, we have a negotiator inbound. He should be here within the next two hours."  
"You want Alpha to do security for this?" Christian asked. Keyes shook her head.

"No. Beta Team will handle security. What I want from you is different."

"Whatever you need, ma'am." Christian said, without hesitation.

"Tell me about these...droids you fought on the frigate. What were they like?"

Christian blinked, slightly taken aback. But it only stopped him for a moment.

To know your enemy is to defeat your enemy, he remembered. One of the mantras that the Spartan-IV program had drilled into his mind.

"Well, to be honest, they weren't a huge individual threat." Christian replied slowly. "They weren't that intelligent, from what I saw. They didn't adapt to our tactics, just shot and took whatever we threw at them. They were pretty bad shots too. The only thing that made them a real threat was their numbers. The closest comparison I can draw to anything we know would have to be Grunts, I guess." Christian paused again, remembering something else. "Not all of them were like that, though. There was this one, on the bridge. Looked different from the rest. It was black, and it moved faster and more fluid that the rest of them."

"Ah, yes. The leader of this Republic detachment, a General Skywalker, called it a commando droid." Keyes scratched her chin and glanced out into space. "Said it was a better model than the B1's that the CIS normally fields."

"B1, ma'am?"

"The droids you spent most of your time on the frigate destroying. Their official designation is the B1, according to Skywalker."

"Understood." Christian turned to look at Keyes. He remembered something else. "There were two other kinds that we saw as well. On the bridge there were these weird rolling ones with energy shields, I think. And a larger one. Looked like a mushroom with legs. _That_ was a tough one. The only thing that punched through it was Kelly's 20mm round. We had to Helljumper Slam it to put it down." Christian paused again.

"Those Skywalker hadn't told us about. Very good, Master Chief."

Christian nodded in response, then stopped, thinking. "Ma'am, might I suggest that we start arming our units with armor-piercing rounds? They seemed to do better damage against these droids than anti-personnel. Plasma seemed to work good against them too."

"Excellent suggestions." Keyes agreed. "I'll see what I can do."

Christian nodded in satisfaction, but stopped in mid-motion as he remembered something else.

"Ma'am, was this General Skywalker on the frigate with us?"

"Yes. He met you on the bridge, and again in the hanger. Why?"

Memories rose in Christian's mind. A black-cloaked human on the frigates bridge, wielding a blue Energy Sword. The same human, in the hangar, just before the two teams escape by dropship.

_So that is the name of this man_, Christian thought. _Skywalker_.

To Keyes, he said; "Just wondering, did he mention anything about my team?"

"Yes, he did actually." Keyes turned to face the Spartan, and her face grew hard. "He said that one of your team was particularly insubordinate, to the point of being vile. I don't believe either of us needs to guess who he is referring too."

"No, ma'am." Christian knew, all to well.

"I thought you said Spartan-419 was under control." Keyes whispered, cold and sharp as a combat knife. "I was informed there would be no more problems."

"And there hasn't been, up until now. Echo just stopped taking her meds-"

"Then make sure she takes them, Master Chief. By any means necessary." Keyes said commandingly. "Or I will be forced to remove her from active duty due to mental health issues. We can not have a repeat of the frigate, especially not during these negotiations. Am I clear, Spartan?"

"Crystal, ma'am." Christian snapped a salute.

"Good." Keyes turned back to the glass. "Tell your team to get some rest, but stay on stand-by. If things go bad, _for whatever reason_, we're going to need your help to deal with the Republic."

"Wilco, ma'am. Consider it done." Christian saluted again, turned, and quickly left the bridge. Keyes watched him leave, and then went back to staring out into space.

* * *

Time passed; an hour or so. Enough time for the star at the center of the system to burn up several billion tons of hydrogen in it's perpetual fusion reaction, the gas giant circling it to finish a full rotation on it's axis, and a large storm to surge up to it's surface, a massive cloud of purples and greens and reds, intermixed with massive lightning bursts.

In orbit of the gas giant, the ships of the two governments hung, each side preparing for the upcoming meeting. Near the start of the hour, another Republic Cruiser had appeared, bearing (according to the communication received by the _Kelly_) the Republic's negotiator, one General Kenobi. About half of that hour later, another _Prowler_-class corvette had emerged from Slipspace and docked with the _Kelly_, disgorging the UNSC's own delegate. In about fifteen minutes, the two negotiators would meet on the UNSC's listening post station, where talks would commence.

It was this delegate that Sam and most of Beta Team had been sent to link up with. According to the rules that Captain Keyes had hashed out with Admiral Yularen, each delegate could bring a translator and a detachment of four soldiers with them for security.

Sam had been lucky enough to be one of the four chosen by Kate for this operation. The other three members walked in sync with her, totally relaxed in the safety of the Supercruiser's hanger. She made a mental list of the squad, just like she'd been taught in training;

Kate, of course. She was team leader; she would obviously be on the security team.

Aden-403, electronics expert. Most likely on this mission for his choice of weaponry, namely the Covenant-produced weapon known as the Type-33 Guided Munitions Launcher (but more commonly as the "Needler") attached to his thigh plate, pink crystalline projectiles glowing softly. The weapon was deadly at close range, something that would prove dead useful if things went bad inside the cramped confines of the space station, a lethality increased both by the needle's limited homing ability, ease of piercing armor and flesh, and the devastating post-impact explosion of multiple embedded needles that the UNSC had nicknamed "supercombine".

Chaz-009, the heavy weapons member of the group. An obvious member of this mission. Like Aden, his chosen weapon would be useful inside the station; in Chaz's case, the M395 Designated Marksman Rifle, the upgraded, 12.7mm-round firing successor to the venerable M392, the weapon that had helped spawned the BR55. Like its predecessor, the 395 was single-shot, but the high-caliber round more than made up for the slow rate of fire.

And Sam herself; she was here because she'd just been on the station, and knew the layout. Not that there was much to know, the station being as small as it was, but Kate wasn't taking any chances; Sam's knowledge of the station was an advantage, and the UNSC was going to use every one they got.

Sam knew for sure she hadn't been chosen for her weapons preference. Unlike most of her team (and the rest of the Spartan-IV's, for that matter), she liked smaller weapons, pistols and submachine guns and the like. Currently, for example, the weapon attached to her side was a Type-51 Directed Energy Rifle/1, more commonly known as the Plasma Repeater. As the name suggested, it was a plasma based weapon, and was usually compared to the UNSC's M7 series of submachine guns; incredibly high rate of fire, low individual round damage. Sam liked it mainly because, unlike the M7, it didn't have to be reloaded when the magazine ran out. Being a plasma-based weapon, the Repeater ran off of an internal battery. Normally, this would have to be recharged when it was depleted, but Sam had modified hers so it received power from her MK VI/B's main reactor, meaning her weapon had effectively unlimited ammunition. The weapon did tend to overhead rather quickly (again, like other plasma weapons), but it was easy enough to vent the weapon manually before this happened.

"Hey, boss," Chaz called out to Kate, breaking Sam from her thoughts. "Any word on who this negotiator is?"

"I haven't heard much," Beta Team's leader replied, looking back over he shoulder but still walking. "I do know she's an ONI spook, and a Lieutenant, so as of now she's our CO."

"Great." Aden added. Sam shared his sentiment, just not out loud. ONI meant the Office of Naval Intelligence...and that meant way to much cloak-and-dagger, need-to-know bullshit for Beta Team's likes.

"It won't be for long," Kate replied. "We get over to the station, make sure nothing happens during the negotiations, and then she's out of our hair. Clean and simple."

"Just how we like it." Chaz said. Sam could guess he was grinning under his helmet. That was the last part of Beta Team's rallying cry; Getting It Done, Clean and Simple.

"Affirmative." Aden said calmly. He was always like this; calm and collected before the bullets started flying, but the complete opposite when he was in the fight.

The group fell silent again. They'd entered the _Kelly_'s primary hanger bay.

To their left where the massive bay doors, shielded by a Covenant-provided energy barrier, similar to the one on the station Sam had seen earlier. Around them sat specimens of just about every flying UNSC vehicle. Longswords, Shortswords, Sabers and Cutlasses hung from launch racks or sat on repair cradles. Next to them sat rows of Pelicans, ready to carry troops and vehicles wherever they were needed. Beyond that line, multiple boxy Albatross heavy transports. Farther back, massive rows of Vertical-Take Off-and-Landing craft sat ready to do battle in a planets atmosphere; AV- 14 Hornet, AV-22 Sparrowhawk and SkyHawk attack VTOLs, UH-144 Falcon tilt-rotor transports, and several massive AC-220 Vulture fire support craft. Further back still, a line of "space bikes"; OF92 EVA Booster Frames, so-named for their vague resemblance to a motorcycle, being little more than a seat and handles attached to a large block of engines and several weapons. There were even several Covenant built Banshees, obviously attached to the _Kelly_ for testing purposes.

"There's our Lieutenant," Kate called out, drawing Sam's (and the rest of her teammates) attention to something in the center of the hanger; a Pelican, painted midnight-black as opposed to the standard olive drab, and bearing the symbol of ONI; a pyramid, half black, half white, with a white ring surrounding a black dot in the center. Apparently, this had been the Pelican that the Prowler had dropped off, carrying the UNSC's negotiator.

Standing next to the dropship was the negotiator herself, looking every bit the ONI spook that she was. Despite herself, Sam found her mind instinctively sizing up this new officer;

She was tall, close to two meters, making her almost the same hight as Sam and her fellow Spartans. Her skin was deathly pale, a sign that she was one of what standard Navy personnel refereed to as "screen gleaners". In other words, an agent who's job was usually related to a screen of some kind, and very rarely meant actual field work.

In fact, the only real sparks of color on the Lieutenant's body, aside from her standard-issue black ONI uniform, were her eyes and her hair; a rather bizarre mix of disturbingly- deep blue and orange.

Sam found herself wondering if, at some point, this Lieutenant had suffered from one of the many plasma radiation-induced aliments that had been blooming into being all over the UNSC since the end of the War. The chemical cocktail used in the treatment would certainly explain her eyes...

The rest of Sam's internal study of the ONI operative was cut off when the subject of her thought process noticed the approaching quartet of Spartans.

"Beta Team, I presume." She said, voice cold and serious. Just like every other ONI operative that Sam had met.

"Yes ma'am. Spartan-206, reporting as ordered." Kate came to a stop a meter or so from the Lieutenant and snapped a crisp salute. To Sam's surprise, the ONI agent returned it.

"Lieutenant Mina Kerrigan." The ONI agent replied. "Are you mission ready? I'd like to leave as soon as possible."

"We're ready to leave when you are." Answered Kate. Lieutenant Kerrigan nodded, then turned back to the Pelican...and paused. She looked around, searching for something, then swore when she didn't find it.

"Virgil, get back here!" She shouted in frustration, the first time Sam had ever seen a spook be anything but calm.

"Ma'am, who's Virg-" Kate started. She stopped abruptly as a large shadow moved over her. Sam, Aden, and Chaz all looked up.

Floating above them, currently at the same hight as the Pelican's port thruster, was a large floating creature, shaped like an overfed jellyfish; a bloated purple and pink body consisting of multiple swollen sacks from which several tentacles hung, along with a long, snake-like head with several eyes. Currently, both the head and two of the tentacles were buried in the innards of the Pelican's engine.

Sam recognized it instantly; an Engineer, also known by the Covenant title of "Huragok".

Quickly, she ran through everything she knew about Engineers, trying to figure out why one would on an ONI negotiation mission.

It wasn't for combat, she could guess that. Engineers were possibly the only Covenant client race that didn't have anything to do with fighting. Even when they were taken into actual battle (the very few times they were), they didn't actively engage in combat. Certainly they would sometimes provide an energy shield of some form to fellow troops, but they never actually attacked anything. That might be why it was here; the closed space of the station would make it a killing ground if worst came to worst, and any extra protection would be welcomed. But that didn't really seem to fit to Sam.

It might be there to provide technical support. That was what an Engineer did best. They were masters of all things mechanical and electrical. Sam herself had seen one take apart a pistol that had been damaged in an explosion, and in fifteen seconds restore the weapon to more than perfect working order. She's also heard that, in minutes, one could repair even mortal damage to a starship's main systems, part of the reason that every Covenant (and some UNSC) ships big enough to have a compliment of Engineers had them. But that didn't really fit either.

Thankfully, Sam was saved any more pondering by Kate, who gazed up at the Engineer and asked, with surprising distaste, "What the hell is that _thing_ doing here?"

Lieutenant Kerrigan glanced up at the Engineer, which apparently noticed it was being watched and slowly floated down to about head hight from the Pelican's engine with a musical trill, like a whale or some other large sea-going mammal. Sam noticed that it had been messing with the fuel flow regulator, splicing together a pair of split wires.

"_Virgil_," Kerrigan said, putting emphasis on the fact that the Engineer had a name. "Is here as our translator."

She glanced up at Virgil, and Sam could see in her face she had no love for it.

Oblivious to Kerrigan and Kate's apparent hatred for it, Virgil whistled and held up something in it's tentacles. Sam took a closer look at it and noticed a wand computer with a microphone, speakers and a digital ink keyboard on it's front. She recognized it quickly; an "Interrogator", an ONI-developed device originally used for exactly that purpose, now more commonly as a translation system for communication between humans and the species of the Covenant that couldn't speak or understand Standard. The devices had a reputation for being unreliable...but with an Engineer running it, it would probably work just fine.

"I doubt that's necessary, ma'am." Kate noted, still looking at the Engineer. Sam noticed her hand stray towards her sidearm, an M6H, which Sam guessed would be enough to kill an Engineer. The H model was almost exactly the same as the more famous M6D, having the same smart-linked KFA-2 scope and 12.7mm ammunition, but a non-reflective electroless nickle finish as opposed to the D's hard chrome.

"Oh?" Kerrigan raised her eyebrow a full two centimeters.

"Alpha Team's intel said they spoke Standard." Kate continued to stare at the floating Engineer.

"Not my call, Spartan." Kerrigan replied. "It's Sierra Oscar Papa for first-contacts."

"Good old Standard Operating Procedure." Aden muttered. Chaz grunted.

"You think we would have changed that after what the Covies did to us," He muttered. Aden nodded in agreement. Kate motioned at them to quite, and they did so.

"They _did_ change it." Kerrigan noted, looking at Chaz. "That's why its required for a translator. To prevent the same things that happened at Harvest from happening here. It also happens, if you would kindly remember your briefing, to be part of our deal with General Kenobi."

"Understood. Orders are orders." Chaz answered. "No complaints from me."

Kerrigan nodded, apparently satisfied.

"Any other questions?" She asked.

Beta Team shook their collective heads.

"Then let's get going."

Without another word, the four Spartans, the spook, and the Engineer boarded the Pelican.

* * *

On the other side of the vacuum from the UNSC fleet, Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi walked calmly down the halls of the Republic Star Destroyer _Resolute_'s main hanger. Despite his outer calm, his mind was riled and churning.

He'd just come back from debriefing Anakin and Ahsoka. And during the meeting, both had told similar stories of the strangeness that they had experienced on board the frigate.

Mainly, the apparent destabilization of the Force.

This alone was the main cause for his worry. Even there, simply walking, Kenobi could feel the..._edge_ to the Force that seemed to permeate this place.

Slowly, he reached out with his mind, feeling for the running current of the Force that surrounded him. Normally, it should have felt calm, like a ribbon of silk or a stream of water. Now, though, it was jagged, more like archaic barbed wire or a rapid.

Kenobi pulled back and shook his head. He really shouldn't be so worried about the Force. Yes, it was worrying how it was behaving out here, but focusing on it when there were more pressing things to deal with wouldn't accomplish anything.

Filing his worries away for when he was back on Coruscant, Kenobi quickened his step. His objective was in sight; the LAAT/i gunship that would take him to the station for the arranged meeting with the UNSC's representative. Arranged around it were the four members of his security detail; the orange-armored Commander CC-2224, alias "Cody", his second in command; Captain Rex, on the mission under orders from Anakin; and two members of Cody's Ghost Company who he recognized as Waxer and Boil, the two scouts he'd worked with during the freeing of Nabat on Ryloth, and who had apparently been part of the team that infiltrated the frigate and made contact with the UNSC.

There was a final member of the group as well, one who wasn't a clone, or even alive. Standing in the corner of the LAAT's bay, currently deactivated, was a golden protocol droid, one which Obi-Wan was quite familiar with; C-3P0, the droid Anakin had put together on Tatooine, on loan from Senator Amidala to serve as the group's translator.

All four clones saluted identically. Obi-Wan turned from 3P0's still form and nodded, gesturing for them to be at ease.

"Ready to go, sir?" Cody asked, pulling his helmet off. Earlier on in their partnership, Obi-Wan had mentioned to Cody that he preferred talking to his clone subordinates without their helmets, and Cody had taken the suggestion as an unofficial order, something Obi-Wan was fine with.

"About as ready as I'll ever be." Obi-Wan replied, smiling slightly. Cody nodded, face unemotional as stone. He slipped his helmet back on, and the small group boarded the gunship. Once aboard, Cody slammed his fist on the ceiling, the non-verbal signal to the pilot to take off. The gunship lurched airborne with a warble of repulserlifts, then soared out of the opening hanger doors into space.

"Anything else happen while I was gone?" Obi-Wan asked.

"Just one thing, sir." Rex said. The clone Captain brought up a pocket holoprojector with his left hand, his right still wrapped around one of the straps hanging from the dropship's roof. The projector warmed, and a figure came into view. Obi-Wan recognized the boxy shape of a Separatist tactical droid, one of the more common Baktoid TX models.

"What is it?" Obi-Wan questioned.

"An intercepted transmission, sir." Rex explained. "We picked it up about fifteen minutes ago."

"Who was it sent to?"

Rex paused, gazing at the hologram of the droid. Obi-Wan could sense the soldier's contempt for the mechanical, even though it was only in hologram form.

"Listen for yourself, sir." He said, before pressing something on the side of the holoprojector. The messaged began playing.

"We have just received a message from Commander Ventress, Count," The droid said, metal hands clasped behind it's back. "She reports that her mission was...a failure."

"You are sure?" Another voice came from the holoprojector's speakers. Obi-Wan knew this one all to well. The cultured, syrupy tones of Count Dooku, former Jedi turned Dark Lord of the Sith and leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

"As we have not received any transmissions from the frigate, or the recovery fleet, I calculate a 98.62 percent chance that she is correct. The odds of a single damaged frigate surviving against a numerically superior force are-"

"That is of no importance." Dooku's voice cut the droid off. "As is the loss of the frigate and fleet. This was the final shipment, correct?"

"Yes, Count." The droid replied, tilting it's head forward in a rather human looking nod. "Merely extra droids for the project."

"And all of the equipment is already delivered?"

"Yes, Count. All excavation equipment is on site and ready to be activated. We simply require your order."

"You have it." The Count's voice seemed to have a strange sense of finality to it. "I will-"

The rest of the recording fizzled into static. Rex turned the holoprojector off.

"We lost the signal there." He explained. "We couldn't get it back."

"Hmmm..." Obi-Wan stroked his beard, deep in thought. Worry filled him. What kind of project could Dooku be so interested in? Something about an excavation...

He remembered back to the beginning of the war, just a month after the Battle of Geonosis. Dooku had been running an excavation back then as well...one that had led him to find a rebuild the dreaded Dark Reaper superweapon. Could he be doing something similar here?

"We need to get Intelligence on this." Obi-Wan said at last, directing the comment at Cody. The clone Commander simply nodded.

"I thought you'd say that," He said. "I've already sent the recording to Coruscant."

"Good man." Obi-Wan patted Cody on his armor's shoulder plate. "Let's just hope that they can come up with something."

"Yes, sir." Cody answered. Obi-Wan smiled grimly, then closed his eyes to meditate.

* * *

Illuminated against the darkness of space, twin points of light approached the UNSC's listening post space station. From one side, the pitch-black Pelican from the _Kelly_. From the other, the standard-painted LAAT/i gunship from the _Resolute_. Both arrived at the same time, flying in tandem into the station's small hanger.

Still in time with each other, the twin transports touched down in their own ways. The Pelican shifted thrust from it's main engines to it's VTOL set, slowly lowering itself to the deck with a _hiss_ of hydraulics as it's landing gear took it's full weight.

The LAAT simply dropped down, repulserlifts shutting down.

There was quiet for a moment as the pilots shut down the main systems on their craft, then both opened their ship's holds.

The four soldiers of each security team exited their respective ships, filing out quickly. Here, for the first time, the two groups showed a difference. The clones, lead by Commander Cody, were mostly relaxed, DC-15A blaster rifles held loosely, pointing at the station's floor, safety's on.

The Spartan-IV's, following Kate's example, were instantly ready to fight, their different firearms slightly up, ready to be raised to full firing position at a moment's notice, those with safeties currently live.

The two leaders, Cody and Kate, glanced at each other for a moment, then nodded, acknowledging each other. The two forces stepped back, each taking position to cover their diplomat.

Once the soldiers were arranged, the negotiators for the two governments exited their crafts. General Kenobi walked out calmly, followed closely by a now-active C-3P0, looking around in interest at the walls and ceiling of the hanger and the Pelican, taking in the design.

Lieutenant Kerrigan literally jumped out of her Pelican, Virgil the Engineer hot on her heels. She glanced around the hanger, eyes hard, body rigid. She glanced at Kenobi, who met her eye, and they both nodded to each other.

"General Kenobi, I presume?" Kerrigan asked, voice cold and emotionless.

"Yes. You must be Lieutenant Kerrigan."

"Correct." Kerrigan motioned to the Spartans, who had taken lose combat stances when 3P0 had appeared, and they relaxed, weapons lowered completely. "Welcome to Sector 4 of the United Nations Space Command, General."

"Pleased to be here." Kenobi smiled slightly, a gesture that Kerrigan completely ignored. "Shall we begin?" He asked, motioning towards the door that lead into the main room of the station. Kerrigan nodded, and the two groups quickly filed through.

The main room of the station was pretty much the same as it had been when Beta Team had last been aboard. The only difference was that a holographic table now sat in the center of the room, extend from it's resting place under the floor via a command from Kerrigan.

Both negotiators sat down, one on either side of the table. Sensing their presence, the table warmed and glowed, projecting a large hologram. After a moment of incoherence (the table not having been used since the station was built), it solidified into the familiar shape of a spiral galaxy. Two seconds lit up in color; one red, the other green. These splotches of color represented the space controlled by the Republic and UNSC, respectively. Even at such a low resolution (the table still in the process of fully activating, having been in storage for so long) it was easy to see that the Republic's space dwarfed the UNSC's, but no one commented on it. Kenobi glanced up at it, looking over it's many stars and planets with the eyes of a person who had been to more than a few of them. Kerrigan ignored it, instead glancing at Kenobi, sizing him up. After a minute, she apparently decided she wanted to get started.

"So...shall we begin?" She asked calmly.

Kenobi shifted his gaze from the galaxy above to Kerrigan.

"By all means." He said, calmly clasping his hands on the table.

With that, negotiations between the United Nations Space Command and the Galactic Republic began.

* * *

As always, time passed. Once the two negotiators began talking, they didn't stop, covering (what seemed to Sam) to be every single possible angle of anything that could happen between the two governments. Still, despite that, she could tell there was a pattern going on, though it was hidden under several levels of politeness and political maneuvering; Kenobi would suggest the possibility of cooperation, and Kerrigan would politely refuse. Then Kenobi would come up with another offer.

Sam quickly realized something; this Republic, for one reason or another, was having trouble with this Confederacy of Independent Systems. This alone surprised Sam. Here was a government that was _thousands_ of times more powerful than the the UNSC (if the billions-of-light-years-wide swath of space that the hologram showed as the Republic's wasn't lying), and they were asking for help from the UNSC, which (according to the intel Penny had acquired and sent to every soldier in local space with a high enough rank, all Spartans included) wasn't big enough to have any real power in their "Senate".

Deep down, Sam was grateful that Lieutenant Kerrigan was refusing to get involved. As much as she hated to admit it, she couldn't see any fighting ending well for the UNSC...

Ten years ago, they'd barely survived the Covenant...what the hell cold they do against a military machine like that of the CIS?

Sam shook herself free of her thoughts of doom and gloom and shivered inside her armor. To distract herself, she switched one her COM, flipping through the bands in an attempt to find anything other than the droning of the two speakers, hopefully one of the non-UNSC sponsored news channels. There was too much ONI Section II propaganda on them.

It was in this way that she heard the transmission being broadcast across the UNSC E-Band.

At first, she skipped over it, thinking it as nothing interesting. But quickly, she switched back to it, and listened to the whole transmission.

What she heard made her blood run cold.

Quickly, she snapped her COM off and jerked into motion, moving over to Lieutenant Kerrigan side. She tapped the ONI agent on the shoulder, all the while keeping her eyes on the four Republic soldiers and General Kenobi.

"Ma'am..." She whispered. "We have a problem..."


	9. Story Update

Sorry this isn't actually a chapter, but I need to get something out real quick.

I appologise for not updating this sooner, but now that Halo 4 is coming out I'm having to scramble to get my stuff done right. There is ONE THING I hate in fanfiction, and that is incorrect canon. And now that the post-Halo-3 canon is in doubt (As is the Clone Wars one for that matter since the series marches on) I'm having to do a bit of editing to get it up to speed.

NEVER FEAR; just like Spartans, this fic will never die while I have a chance.

I'm probably just going to wait till Halo 4 comes out to do some REAL updating. But I'll have a new chapter for you in the near future.

Thanks for all your support and favorites everyone! I'm open to plot suggestions too (much thanks to worldwandere 2.0 for that BTW)

Spartan's Never Die!

Cmdr. Gen. Marasco, over and out.


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